Year 7

The family and pets; the weather; food; personal information; shopping; free time. Grammar includes: the present tense of common regular and irregular verbs; the immediate future; object pronouns; adjective agreements; noun plurals; interrogative forms. Most of our class work is oral (conversations, questions and answers, role plays) and the listening passages are based on situations that students of this age might well encounter in France.

Year 8

Consolidating and improving grammar, with lots of emphasis on oral work; composition and letter writing based on real life situations; travel; school life; illnesses; buying clothes; ordering a meal in a restaurant; expressing your opinions. Grammar includes: reflexive verbs; the perfect tense; recognising the imperfect tense; modal verbs; relative pronouns; direct object pronouns. The course in enhanced with a project on French history. There's also an optional exchange visit to Marseille.

Year 9

If you've been studying French since Year 7, this year is about consolidating your understanding of French in the four key areas of speaking, listening, reading and writing. We look at leisure and holiday activities, future work and study plans, travel, European integration and the environment. Grammar includes: the perfect, imperfect and future tenses; negatives; interrogatives; strong and weak pronouns; indirect object pronouns; expressions of time.

Alternatively, if you didn’t take up French in Year 7, now's your chance! You can begin a three-year GCSE course in Year 9 covering the same topics as the Year 7 curriculum.

Year 10

If you've been studying French since Year 7 there’s intensive listening and oral practice, including an extra conversation lesson every week and we use lots of authentic reading and audio-visual material to broaden vocabulary. There are topics on future work and study, travelling and other cultures, health and medicine, communications, the arts and the environment. Grammar includes: the conditional and conditional perfect; the pluperfect; sequence of tenses with "si"; the simple past tense; reported speech; consolidating verbs and pronouns.

Students who started French in Year 9 cover the family and personal relationships, school, places, shopping, restaurants, food and travel. In grammar, they learn to use the future and past tenses, direct object pronouns, prepositions and adjectival forms.

Year 11

Students take their GCSE this year and so they encounter more advanced vocabulary and grammar. Topics covered include the environment, the world of work, health and fitness and Francophonie. Our grammar work involves the conditional, the pluperfect, the passive and the simple past. There's a project on the French media and we add an extra oral lesson a week to improve fluency.

Year 12

We aim to deepen understanding of contemporary French culture and society and study the world of work; education; travel; political systems; social and cultural trends. We meet the present and perfect subjunctive and do more advanced work on prepositional verbs, idioms and complex syntax. We also acquire the critical vocabulary to start discussing short literary texts. There's an oral assessment on a topic you research yourself and you should visit a French speaking country at some point during the year. You can apply for one of our travel scholarships if you'd like and there's also a weekend trip to Paris in July. Students have one intensive oral lesson a week.

Year 13

Another literary text (by a classic writer like Molière); researching a topical debate for the final oral assessment; the Second World War; technology; environmental and ethical issues; current politics.