Curriculum
Our Remarkable Curriculum Vision
Driven by our ethos and values, our ambitious and engaging curriculum empowers our students with the knowledge and skills needed to achieve success in their future lives, as well as the character traits to enable them to navigate and make a positive impact on the world around them.
Our curriculum is carefully sequenced in each subject to ensure that students gain the disciplinary and substantive knowledge that will allow them to become subject experts. The structure of our curriculum enables students to assimilate and retain new learning, by consciously linking this to existing knowledge and skills and ensuring that key concepts are revisited over time. Our teachers use assessment skilfully to ascertain where individual students have gaps in learning, and to prioritise reteaching of missed or misunderstood content.
In 2021 we signed up to become a High Performance Learning (HPL) Pathway School and are mid-way through a two year journey of implementing the HPL framework alongside our curriculum content. The HPL framework underpins the learning culture and educational fabric of the academy: we are strongly aligned to the belief that all students can be explicitly taught the mindsets and behaviours of high performance, allowing them to achieve aspirational goals. In practice, this means that our curriculum has ambitious endpoints for all students, and that students are taught predominantly in mixed performance classes where high quality adaptive teaching enables all students to meet these challenging curriculum aims.
The overarching aims of our curriculum:
Develop students' cultural capital, civic understanding and citizenship in the community.
Encourage students to be flexible and reflective, taking account of changing knowledge and contexts.
Rigorously support the key transitional moments in our students' lives, enabling them to be ready for their next steps.
Define the cumulative endpoints of each subject’s curriculum and have clearly stated success criteria about what students will need to be able to know and do at those endpoints.
Have a carefully planned and sequenced curriculum so that new knowledge and skills build on previous learning, and towards those defined endpoints.
Reflect the Broadlands local context by addressing typical gaps in students’ knowledge and skills.
Retain a broad curriculum for as long as possible, with students able to study a strong academic core of subjects, such as those offered by the English Baccalaureate (EBacc).
Inspire high performance and aspirational goals for every young person.
Be inclusive of all students, without putting a ceiling on what they can achieve.
Maximise available opportunity and provision for every student within financial constraints.