Dire Ambition

Choosing Dire Ambition as your English programme for Year 10 means that you probably found the political, more socially-conscious aspects of your Key Stage 3 programme attractive; you’re probably irritated by injustice and your ironic humour has probably got you into trouble on more than one occasion… This programme will take a satirical approach. You’ll need to think fast, question everything and be willing to speak up. You will be asked to challenge yourself as well as others, take risks and show ambition.

We’ll be reading the work of some of the 19th and 20th Century’s greatest satirists, poets and authors. We’ll explore political language and investigate the gulf between what the powerful say and what you experience. We’ll look at the grammar and style of a range of satirical writing and publish our own. We’ll read Macbeth and explore the impact of unfettered ambition in Dickens’ Great Expectations as well as the moral compromises presented in Alan Bennet’s play The History Boys. Throughout, you will be practising the key skills required to succeed in the GCSE examinations. In parallel to this everyone will be completing for homework their own longitudinal social inquiry by investigating links between self-selected books, films and art and presenting these in verbal form.