Curriculum overview

Our curriculum aims to reflect our school values in every element of its design and delivery:

• Courage: We support our students to master the challenging EBacc curriculum, and we build their courage with an enhanced creative and performing arts programme. Our responsive teaching enables students to make exceptional progress over their 5 years at secondary school, giving them the confidence to step up into Bolingbroke Sixth Form and beyond.
• Compassion: We take a compassionate approach to student needs, and understand that a teacher’s knowledge of the whole child is vital to support their learning inside and outside the classroom.
• Community: Our curriculum is created to ensure all pupils keep learning inside and outside the classroom; we encourage our students to engage with the local community as a way of developing cultural capital and awareness of wider society.
• Empowering excellence: Our young people commence each day with a 25-minute Personal Development programme.

Our curriculum is designed according to the following principles:

1. Planning for every stage: We want our students to have the option to attend the best universities and apprenticeships, so we plan from this aim. The rhythm of our curriculum is designed to support knowledge retention, and seeks to ensure students have completely mastered a topic before progressing.
2. Knowledge rich: The knowledge for each year group is sequenced by passionate subject experts who embrace their subject communities – both across the Ark Network and outside the network.
3. Skills: The explicit teaching of skills, as well as knowledge, is paramount for pupils to reach their academic potential. Skills development is documented in medium term plans, as well as lesson by lesson.
4. Reading: All KS3 pupils receive weekly reading lessons to develop a love of reading, ensuring they can read at their actual age and develop their vocabulary and comprehension skills.
5. Independent learning: Our curriculum design prioritises independent practice to help solidify learning outside the classroom. We track independent learning through digital platforms such as Hegarty, Seneca, Education Perfect and Uplearn.
6. Stretch & support: We recognise that pupils join the school at different starting points. We work closely with our feeder schools to understand and influence the key knowledge taught by the of year 6. Regardless of their starting point, all pupils continually receive opportunities to stretch their understanding in every lesson, and support to access all parts of the curriculum.
7. Wider curriculum: Our pupils’ entitlement to a rich and varied curriculum isn’t limited to subjects. We recognise that some students within our community do not have access to the same wider development opportunities as their peers; our extended curriculum seeks to address this and provide equality of opportunity for all.

Effective assessment provides vital information to improve teaching and learning outcomes.

Our rigorous progress and target setting model supports this. We provide children with regular feedback on their learning so that they understand what they need to do to improve, and our lesson plans are formed with a detailed knowledge of each pupil and their needs.

We also give parents/carers regular reports on their child’s progress so that teachers, children and parents/carers can all work together to raise the attainment of the child.

Please click below for our 'Communicating Pupil Progress' document which goes in to further depth on our feedback and partnership with parents and carers. You will also find our Autumn KS3 Curriculum Rubrics here which go in to detail on how each descriptor links to your pupils' learning across their subject areas.