Our Curriculum and Teaching
Aspirational curriculum
In today’s fast-changing world, our curriculum is vital for preparing children for future challenges. It holds the highest ambition for all, defining the essential skills and knowledge that provide a strong foundation for our children’s education. Additionally, it fosters spirituality, character, and wellbeing, fostering a sense of purpose, ethical values, and resilience. Through this holistic approach, which inspires curiosity and reflection, children grow not only academically but also as compassionate, confident individuals, ready to contribute positively to their communities and the wider world. The curriculum enriches children’s cultural capital, providing them with broad knowledge, rich experiences and diverse perspectives that enable them to take advantage of opportunities throughout their lives.
Essentials for excellence
Clear learning goals and engaging content: Define what children should know and do, including the golden threads that connect learning across the curriculum, focusing on knowledge transfer to long-term memory. Ensure content is relevant, inspiring and stimulates curiosity and interest, making learning meaningful and aiding long-term retention.
Foundational knowledge: Ensure a sharp and relentless focus on children’s basic skills and foundational knowledge enabling all children to access and learn the full breadth of the curriculum.
Subject distinctions: Develop a clear and shared understanding of subject disciplines, including pedagogical approaches that lead to children learning the curriculum deeply.
Accessible to all: Use adaptations to meet diverse learning needs, ensuring all children can access and build knowledge successfully.
Assessment and feedback: Ensure assessment is used strategically to monitor progress, address misconceptions, identify knowledge gaps and continuously refine and improve the curriculum.
Respect and responsibility: Ensure children feel valued, respected, and included. Promote equality, justice, and courageous advocacy, encouraging children to act with integrity, compassion, and a sense of responsibility towards others and the world around them.
Excellence in teaching
Excellent teaching happens within an aspirational and inclusive culture, rooted in respect, compassion and the belief that every child is precious and capable of flourishing. Excellent teachers have a deep understanding of the content they are delivering, create a nurturing, inspiring environment, that ignites curiosity and activates hard thinking to empower all learners. When educators strive for excellence, they inspire a transformative process that helps learners grow in wisdom, resilience and self-worth, so evolving into self-motivated, adaptable individuals equipped to navigate a rapidly evolving world.
Essentials for excellence
Activate prior learning: Teachers plan tasks that activate children’s prior knowledge, connecting new information to what they already know to enhance comprehension and retention.
Explain and model in small steps: Teachers break down complex concepts into small, manageable steps with clear explanations and models. This ensures all children can follow and understand the material and is supported to succeed.
Ask effective questions to check for understanding: Teachers consistently use effective questioning techniques to engage children, assess their understanding and encourage curiosity, dialogue, and a sense of wonder. This helps identify misconceptions and ensures all children are on track.
Adapt practice and provide scaffolds: Teachers thoughtfully adjust their teaching approaches and provide targeted scaffolds to ensure all children can access learning and succeed. As understanding deepens, support is gradually reduced, fostering independence, confidence, and long-term learning.
Provide time for practice: Teachers allocate sufficient time for children to engage in both independent, reflective and deliberate practice, reinforcing new skills and concepts and deepening understanding. This helps children apply what they have learned and develop autonomy.
Provide feedback and address misconceptions: Teachers offer timely, specific feedback that builds self-belief, encourages perseverance, corrects misunderstandings and nurtures wisdom. This helps learners to flourish both academically and personally.
The curriculum in our schools
Each school will have a curriculum statement which outlines their unique approach to the curriculum; how this reflects the context of the school and its community, and the key drivers of this curriculum. These drivers shape the curriculum which will also reflect the vision and values of each school. The curriculum will take the national curriculum as its minimum standard for breadth and will describe clearly the progression in skills and knowledge that will enable all to learn.
Our school curricula will map the substantive and disciplinary knowledge that will be taught in each subject area. Learning will be deliberately and logically sequenced within each subject so that children can build schema and remember more.
The Implementation of the Curriculum
Subject specific, whole school progression maps enable teachers to build upon pupils’ prior learning and signpost to future learning, thus deepening children’s ability to connect learning over time and see that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Teaching staff use the underpinning knowledge and skills progression documents to plan sequences of lessons that build on prior learning. Elicitation and diagnostic activities are carried out at the start of each new unit of learning to establish children’s prior knowledge and understanding as the starting point.
We ensure that our subject-specific curriculum maps and resources provide rigour so that children can, for example, think like a historian or scientist. The use of high-quality resources and learning environments are a fundamental part of the learning process. As a Trust we will support the use of a range of published curriculum vehicles though none of these should be used as an ‘off the shelf’ solution. Schools must tailor and adapt appropriately to meet the needs of the children.
Assessment
Assessment should an ongoing process which informs teaching and improves learning. Gaps in vocabulary or knowledge are quickly identified and rectified. Any arising misconceptions are planned for in subsequent learning experiences. Feedback is a key tool, as children are supported in accurate learning and knowing what they know (metacognition). Assessment, ultimately, enables precision in knowing both the security of learning and next steps. See here
The Impact of the Curriculum
An effective curriculum will impact widely on children’s learning and therefore their achievement; this includes building cultural capital through exposure to a rich and diverse curriculum. Children will gain and retain subject-specific knowledge and skills, which over time takes them from novice to expert.
Academies provide opportunities for overlearning, retrieval and assessment to ensure that knowledge and concepts have been understood and retained. The focus on vocabulary and language acquisition ensures that all children, including those from disadvantaged or vulnerable backgrounds, have equal access to learning and build learning security commensurate with their peers.
Inclusion
All academies ensure that all children take part in all areas of the curriculum (with the exception of those areas where parents have exercised their right to request withdrawal). All children will be enabled to take part in the curriculum through a range of strategies. This may be through the scaffolding of teaching and/or tasks; the curriculum is not scaled back (differentiated) as this creates and adds to the disadvantage gap. All children are expected and enabled to achieve well. Scaffolding can also include pre-teaching, pupil conferencing or intervention groups, where, for example, language, vocabulary and key concepts are introduced and/or consolidated. For children who readily master the age-appropriate learning, they are enabled to utilise their subject-specific knowledge and skills through deeper application.
Collaboration
Collaboration is a strength of our Trust. Schools readily share the work they are doing with each other and support one another on the improvement journey. It is an expectation that schools will share their expertise, skills and resources for the benefit of all in the Trust. Through collaboration we will support schools to improve their curriculum and develop resources that support learning.