Our Curriculum

Our Vision

Our vision is Students First: Raising Standards and Transforming Lives. To achieve this vision, we provide an ambitious first-class educational experience for every child who attends our inclusive primary and secondary academies believing the quality of education a child receives empowers their future choices and life chances.

Our Ambitious Intent

The power of our inclusive curriculum rests in our determination that all children enjoy a wide range of subjects and experiences. For young people attending our primary and secondary academies we provide an accessible and enjoyable educational experience that ensures academic success, develops life-long skills, and offers rich experience. An Outwood education supports every child and young person to grow as well-rounded and responsible citizens who can fulfil their potential and ability to play a positive role in society.

Across our curriculum each year is designed to build to the next. Curriculum planning focuses subject and core content knowledge and skills to aid our students’ knowledge recall, build their subject fluency and deepen their understanding. Our expert curriculum planning across all subjects and the wider curriculum for example Relationship, Sex and Health Education clearly state what children learn across the year and throughout their time at Outwood. Our knowledge rich curriculum supports our students to access their next steps in education at every level as we believe the longer one continues in education and/or training the greater the reward in health, happiness and social mobility.

Our ambitious curriculum matches the demands of the national curriculum at each stage so that our students can meet and exceed age related national expectations. Across our curriculum we clearly map our expectation of the rich knowledge and understanding that is required in each subject. Teachers effectively adapt schemes of learning to meet the needs of students in their classes. Across the wide range of subjects offered we robustly plan our progressive delivery to best secure our students learning and academic achievement. We value the importance of the primary programmes of study and secondary core and EBacc subjects etc and ensure our students’ entitlement to these. At secondary and sixth form we bespoke our curriculum models to each academy balancing breadth and depth with context and flexibility whilst also taking into consideration any local or regional influences alongside parent and student choice within our offer.

The quality of our Trust’s curriculum was praised by Ofsted in its Summary Evaluation of our Trust in June 2019:

“An extensive curriculum review, involving staff from schools across the Trust, has resulted in a knowledge-rich curriculum model which extends from early years to post-16. This matches the demands of the national curriculum at relevant key stages. While there is a Trust-wide expectation of the knowledge and understanding that is required in each subject, there is also autonomy for subject leaders and teachers to adapt schemes of learning to meet the needs of pupils in each school. Trust leaders are ambitious for the academic achievement of pupils in a wide range of subjects. A higher-than-average proportion of pupils, study humanities, the arts and languages at key stage 4. Year-on-year, the proportion of pupils studying the EBacc is increasing.” Claire Brown Senior Her Majesty’s Inspector.

We know that great schools are only sustainable within happy and healthy communities and that we must all work together to tackle the causes of under-acheivement and disadvantage. We work hard to ensure that our school improvement model and the curriculum offered is rooted in our communities and goes hand-in-hand with our aims of being a family of inclusive academies in the heart of their communities where all children are cared for and where standards are raised and lives transformed.

Our Aims

The high-quality education experience we provide is empowered by an ambitious, knowledge rich curriculum that enables all children and young people to achieve well. Our curriculum aims to narrow gaps in achievement for all student groups, enable access and prepare our children and young people well for their future steps. Our curriculum aims to ensure learning can flourish by:

• Fostering an inclusive culture of responsibility, respect and safety with an ethos of praise, pride and purpose

• Providing excellent teaching across a broad and balanced range of subjects to engage our learners

• Promoting mental wellbeing encouraging positive relationships and acceptance

• Encouraging healthy lifestyle choices, self-regulation and personal accountability

• Appreciating diversity and difference and valuing tolerance, democracy, liberty and law

• Recognising issues that affect our world and acknowledging actions that can be taken

• Supporting students’ ambitions, and interests to open future study and career pathways

The work of our Trust was recognised by the Minister State (Education), “Similarly, we can look at the work of leading multi-academy trusts such as Outwood Grange Academies Trust, which time after time radically improves schools that have had a long history of entrenched failure. That MAT provides long neglected communities in this country with the transformational education that they need." (Education and Attainment of White Working-Class Boys, Nick Gibb Excerpts, 12th February 2020)