With over 450 million native speakers, Spanish is the second most spoken language in the world. Spoken as a first language in 21 countries, learning Spanish can take you further than you ever imagined. The ability to speak Spanish will allow you to discover the rich culture of not only Spain itself, but also almost all countries in Central and South America. Having the ability to speak even a little Spanish whilst travelling can open new experiences and can give you valuable insight into the lives of native Spanish speakers.  

With such a range of countries having Spanish as their official language, knowing Spanish is extremely useful in the international job market and can strengthen your CV and improve job prospects. This can open the doors to a wide variety of challenging opportunities within businesses not only across the globe but also within England. 

Our aim is not only to create a curriculum that allows students to understand and communicate in Spanish, but to foster a love of the culture and history of the countries that speak it.  We do this by: 

• Challenging our students to think like linguists – we do this by teaching our students about the fundamental skills they will need to learn a language.  Students will be able to explain basic grammatical features and rules of Spanish and use and manipulate these to communicate effectively with other speakers  

• Helping our students to develop a passion for the culture and history of the countries studied – we cover a variety of cultural topics including ‘Día de los Muertos’ 

In the Spanish curriculum, we make sure that a wide range of topics are covered in depth and cover the four skills: speaking, writing, listening and reading.  In order to do this, we structure our lessons on the PPP model; Present, Practice, Produce.  This way, students are supported when new topics, ideas and vocabulary are presented.  This ensures that our students become more resilient learners by encouraging them that making mistakes is an important part of the learning journey.  Students also experience a range of metacognitive activities to help them and retain and reuse the information that they have learned. 

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KS3 success 

Speaking and Listening:  Students will be able to ask and answer some very basic questions from certain topics (My Town; Who am I?; Hobbies; School etc).  These will be set phrases rather than a manipulation of the target language. 

Students will begin to distinguish between different types of target language and respond appropriately.  Students will be able to understand simple spoken excerpts in Spanish.  

Reading and Writing:  Students will be able to understand a range of basic texts in Spanish.  These will include the use of tenses and opinions.  Students will be able to respond appropriately to these texts.  Using the target language as a model, students will be able to respond to these questions in Spanish. 

Culture:  Students will be able to recognise the different cultures and religions in the Spanish-speaking world and answer questions in a range of formats on these. 

KS4 success 

Speaking and Listening:  Students will be able to ask and answer simple questions in a variety of situations spontaneously.  Students will be able to use a range of grammatical structures (verb tenses, adjectival agreement etc) to communicate effectively in Spanish. 

Students will be familiar with a range of dialects in Spanish and respond appropriately.  Students will be able to decipher the meaning of spoken passages in Spanish and respond appropriately.  

 Reading and Writing:  Students will be able to read and understand a range of texts (fiction, non-fiction, articles, songs etc).  Students will recognise different moods, tenses and registers, and will be able to manipulate these for their own writing.  Students will be able to summarise and respond to these questions on these texts. 

Culture:  Students will be able to recognise various aspects of Spanish-speaking cultures from a variety of countries around the world.  This includes food, music, history, film, TV, religion etc.  Students will be empathetic towards these differing values.