Communication skills are the key to study, work and life. For this reason, English lies at the core of the curriculum in any school. Bromsgrove is no exception with English courses occupying major blocks on the timetable from Year 9 all the way up to the end of the Sixth Form.

As a department, we see our mission as being to help our students acquire the intellectual tools they need to use the language with flair and creativity as speakers, listeners, readers and writers. It's not just about reading "old books", although we like to think that we can make literature exciting enough for our students to see no need for the continued use of those inverted commas. We engage in discussion, drama and debate, and, when we talk about "texts", they could just as easily be television advertisements as Romantic poems. Indeed, since one of the courses we offer is Media Studies A Level, those students particularly interested in the former can spend two years indulging themselves if they so wish.

We are superbly resourced, with a new state-of-the-art building, fabulous ICT facilities and a formidable collection of texts (and that's excluding the school's magnificent library); but to really succeed in English you ultimately need one attribute: an imagination. It's through the nurturing and development of that precious faculty that we hope to turn our students into people who appreciate the world around them with depth and perception and who can articulate their ideas with wit, clarity and eloquence.