Our Curriculum
Our Curriculum
The spiral approach to curriculum has three key principles that sum up the approach nicely. The three principles are:
Cyclical: Students should return to the same topic several times throughout their school career;
Increasing Depth: Each time a student returns to the topic it should be learned at a deeper level and explore more complexity;
Prior Knowledge: A student’s prior knowledge should be utilised when a topic is returned to so that they build from their foundations rather than starting anew.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan
Our assessments have been designed to inspire and motivate students, providing appropriate stretch and challenge whilst ensuring, as far as possible, that the assessment and texts are accessible to the full range of students.
The specification will enable students of all abilities to develop the skills they need to read, understand and analyse a wide range of different texts covering the 19th, 20th and 21st century time periods as well as to write clearly, coherently and accurately using a range of vocabulary and sentence structures.
We have worked closely with teachers to design our specification to inspire, challenge and motivate every student, no matter what their level of ability, while supporting you in developing creative and engaging lessons.
We have developed assessment strategies that support students’ achievement in an untiered, closed book context through the use of extract-based questions in the assessment of the 19th-century novel and the Shakespeare plays.