Explore... Discover... Create... Grow

The English Department is an exciting, creative, intellectually curious and academically successful place. 

Our courses are varied and challenging, with pupils exploring a wide variety of texts, ideas and methods of communication in excellent facilities. Literacy, research, essay and exam skills are tailored to individual pupils’ needs and developed throughout their time at the College. We offer OCR’s GCSE English Literature and AQA’s GCSE English Language specifications. Additionally, students can study OCR’s A Level English Literature course during their Sixth Form years with students able to complete non-examined assessments on a topic of their choice.

To study English is to embark upon an adventure down countless possible pathways. 

Rendcomb's English Department equips pupils to explore as many pathways as possible, both independently and interdependently, by offering a wide variety of enrichment opportunities. These include author visits, theatre trips, conferences, competitions, units based on current affairs and book clubs.  We encourage all students to get involved, do their best and have fun.

Recent enrichment highlights have included visits from renowned writers Simon Armitage, John Hegley and Andy Briggs as well as story-telling sessions from the internationally acclaimed Patrick Ryan, and the brilliant outreach team at Shakespeare’s Globe. Sixth Form Literary House Parties to the Lake District, Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford and Dorset have proved very popular, as has the annual Big Book Quiz and year-appropriate trips to the theatre and Cheltenham Literature Festival.  A Year 9 cohort also recently published their own children’s book, and two students made it in to the highly competitive Sky Arts Britannica poetry anthology last year.

We give pupils every chance to achieve success and find fulfilment in their English studies. 

By publishing and displaying pupil work in a range of contexts we aim to help them feel pride and satisfaction. Bold creativity, endeavour and cultural awareness are rewarded alongside academic success. We value the spoken as well as the written word.

We challenge pupils to read widely and well, encouraging open-mindedness, curiosity and thoughtfulness. 

Our links with the College Library and local independent bookshops are strong. We want students to recognise the role reading books and other media plays in helping us understand the human condition and become all that we can be.