Year 11 & 13 Raising Standards

OUR CURRICULUM

“The capacity to learn is a gift; The ability to learn is a skill; The willingness to learn is a choice.”

― Brian Herbert

"Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today."

- Malcolm X

OUR CURRICULUM INTENT

This community inspires a love of learning and enables alumni to lead long, happy and successful lives that leave a positive legacy.

Our mission is simple but ambitious: to provide an excellent education to every child, in every classroom, every day.

Our Curriculum - The What?

The curriculum at Aylward is broad and ambitious meeting and going beyond the National Curriculum.

It is made up of 3 components:

1. The Academic Curriculum - Knowledge rich

2. The Character Curriculum - Personal Development

3. The Aylward Entitlement - Cultural and Social Capital

Key drivers for our curriculum :

1. The Academic Curriculum : Knowledge Rich

Learning at Aylward is defined as “changes to long term memory”. The Academic Curriculum is underpinned by academic research and an understanding of cognitive science. We understand that many students arrive at Aylward with educational debt. Therefore, the curriculum selects foundational knowledge and sequences this to build increasingly complex schema for students allowing them to develop from novices to experts. The selection of this foundational knowledge is in recognition that a novice vs an expert is domain specific. We ensure that the selection and sequencing of knowledge in our long term plans and Knowledge Maps is intentional and explicit to enable new knowledge to be more “sticky”.

2. The Character Curriculum : Personal Development

Our daily personal development curriculum ensures that our students develop their spiritual, moral, social and cultural awareness. We cover all elements of our Physical, Social, Health curriculum during this time, including relationship and sex education. There is one Tutor lesson per day, and all students take part, including those children with SEND. Our PSHCE curriculum is ‘owned’ by students of all faiths and backgrounds. We embrace and celebrate the values of democracy, liberty and respect for differences. We also have a weekly assembly during this time that ensures these British values are understood. We cover the government’s Gatsby benchmarks to ensure our students are career ready.

We believe that Excellence, Integrity, Kindness and Self Control are the values that will enable our students to develop a love of learning and live long, happy and successful lives that leave a positive legacy. Therefore we actively teach and celebrate these values through our character curriculum. This is delivered through positive recognition, assemblies and daily morning meetings.

3. The Aylward Entitlement : Cultural and Social Capital

We believe every student at Aylward should access the Aylward Entitlement. This is an intentionally selected and spiralled enrichment offer made up of the Aylward Aspire 5. This provides Aylward students the opportunity to have experiences that build cultural and social capital to live long, happy and successful lives.

Specialist Intervention Curriculum – THE HUB

A specialised pathway to support the removal of barriers to learning

“Our mission is to provide first-rate guidance and support to our students by taking into account their individual needs to understand what they need in order to reach their potential”

The Aims of the Hub

The Hub is designed to support in removing barriers to learning by providing an opportunity for individual, diagnostic and therapeutic work to identify strategies which advise reasonable adjustments for quality first teaching. This involves working effectively with individual students who are experiencing significant difficulties, their parents/carers, school staff as well as external agencies in order to identify and overcome the barriers preventing their learning. In turn, we aim to offer appropriate support to assist them in achieving their effective reintegration back into a learning environment.

We aim to challenge students to develop essential behaviour for learning skills, to develop self-belief, improve self-esteem and to re-engage with learning in mainstream lessons in the Academy. We also work to increase the students’ responsibility through target setting, self-reflection, monitoring and evaluation.

We ensure that young people can have an opportunity to gain access to an appropriate curriculum, adapted to meet their individual needs and differences by means of a detailed assessment of their learning, social and emotional needs. The welcoming environment aims to help provide positive messages about self-respect and achievement.

Support Provided

Preventative work and Early Help
Hub Provision
Hub Support
Bespoke Curriculum offer

For further detailed information regarding our Hub Curriculum please refer to our curriculum policy found here.

The Hub New to English Curriculum

On entry to the Academy, if it has been identified that a pupil is new to the English Language, such that they would struggle to access instructions given in a mainstream classroom or around the school, the following model is implemented at KS3. This would be followed until a student has a level of English that allows them to safely understand instructions required to travel around the Academy, understand essential classroom commands and communicate at a level that they can access differentiated work in English. At KS4, as above, however, pupils will follow ESOL entry courses which enable pupils to read and write a variety of formal and informal texts. Pupils will also be able to get information from different texts and pictures. Pupils will practise writing in the present and past tense, use conjunctions and adjectives as well as improve punctuation and spelling. (see sample curriculum guides below)

EAL intervention at the Academy covers a variety of skills-based learning across various subjects. Pupils learn not only to improve their overall English language skills, but also how to extract information, identify key points and bond with other pupils who have a shared experience of being new to the UK; in some cases new to education.

As pupils’ progress in their English language acquisition, they graduate out of their provision. Currently we have tired provision; the aim is for all puipls to ‘graduate’ from EAL intervention programmes into mainstream lessons. Using the EAL code set as a functional guide, pupils who are A and B learners receive intervention in the form of withdrawal support.

EAL Induction Intervention Programme

- Ruth Miskin Literacy – Phonics - Tiered
- Curriculum Lead Induction - Tiered
- Maths Intervention
- ESOL – KS4

Offsite Alternative Curriculum Interventions

A small number of our highest-need students access offsite alternative education providers through a range of Enfield and Haringey providers including:

Footsteps
First Rung
Enfield College
Conel college
Capel Manor College
REACH programme
ACE programme

We have a designated careers lead who works collaboratively with all our providers to ensure the courses studied suits the needs of the specific student, who ensures daily communication happens to monitor their attendance and meets regularly with them to monitor their progress on the courses they attend. All providers have all relevant DBS checks.

Relationships, Sex, and Health Education

RSHE is part of our 'Personal Development' programme, which is led by Ms Jo O'Gorman at jogorman@aylwardacademy.org

Please also refer to our trust wide RSHE policy which can be found on our statutory information page.

Please note paper copies of key information about our curriculum offer is available on request

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