Curriculum Vision
Curriculum development is an on-going process, and the curriculum is at the heart of the School’s purpose, reflecting our core values of Community, High Expectation, Opportunities, Innovation, Curiosity and Endeavour.
Each department has spent time considering the powerful knowledge in their area, thinking carefully about what high performance looks like in their subject at the end of each key stage and working together to design a curriculum that is ambitious, challenging and gives students opportunities to think creatively, apply their knowledge fluently and go beyond the national curriculum and exam specifications. By doing so, we enable our students to discover that vital spark which makes them unique and equip them to thrive in a complex world, ready to make a positive contribution locally and globally as tomorrow’s leaders.
Our curriculum is designed to support students to build knowledge and develop skills over time by breaking them down into their component parts, ensuring that new ideas are connected to prior learning, sequenced thoughtfully and taught coherently. Underpinning this is staff professional learning on building schema, the spiral curriculum and memory. Our assessment structure allows us to continously assess and teach responsively in the classroom, as well as using regular 'common assessments' to measure students' progress, using this information to 'reteach, retrieve and/or replan' as appropriate.
We love the metaphor of our curriculum being both a mirror and a window. A mirror because our students can see themselves, our local area and their experiences reflected in it and a window to represent our ambition to take students’ learning beyond their immediate experiences and challenge them to think globally, confidently and creatively.
Curriculum Design Principles for Subject Areas:
Our whole school principles of curriculum are:
- The curriculum has been broken down into its component parts and carefully sequenced to build knowledge, understanding and skills over time towards clearly defined end points.
- ‘Start with the end in mind’ – subject areas have thought carefully about the end points at KS2/3/4/5 in terms of knowledge, understanding and skills.
- ‘The spiral curriculum’ – core concepts, knowledge or ideas are deliberately re-visited and developed over time to support students to ‘know more and remember more’.
- Opportunities for students to learn ‘how to think’ and ‘how to behave’ are increasingly woven into our curricula.
- The curriculum in each subject area is a shared endeavour – everyone knows where they have come from, where they are headed and why the journey has been planned in this way.
- ‘Balanced and relevant’ – The curriculum promotes intellectual, moral, spiritual, aesthetic, creative, emotional and physical development in a way in which pupils can connect to it, providing them with opportunities to make informed choices.