Our Curriculum Offer Statement: Intent. Implementation. Impact.

Intent

The rationale and breadth of our Curriculum Offer is designed with four aims in mind:

1) design a purposeful, challenging curriculum offer for all, which enables each child to stand shoulder to shoulder with their peers

2) deliver an accurate, needs-led and personalised curriculum offer, based on a 3 tiered model of provisions: formal; developmental; and additional

3) provide pupils with an enriched personal development offer which nurtures collaboration, discovery, confidence and interests; and promotes excellent Literacy skills

4) nurture high competence and a love of reading

Our 4 Core Values

Our Core Values are pivotal to daily life at RLA and underpin all that we do at RLA and form the mutual, unconditional regard for all children and adults. They are:

Integrity. Courage. Resilience. Kindness

Following consultation and a democratic voting process, our 4 Values (taught and revisited each half term, sequentially) were agreed upon for us to teach our Curriculum Drivers through.

We are passionate about doing the right things for our children and ourselves; but we are equally passionate about doing the right things in the right way and our Core Values guide us in our behaviours.

Our Core Values are complemented by additional, developmental values which contribute to our nurturing of the whole child to be successful in their next stage of learning.

Our Curriculum Drivers

To identify our potential Vision statement and Curriculum Drivers, we asked ourselves:

• What does our holistic Curriculum not yet deliver to lessen social mobility barriers?
• Without prejudice, what challenges and opportunities do the backgrounds of our children present?
• How can we best champion the culture and climate we value?
• Do we make the most of our local and regional location and networks?
• Do we prepare our pupils for the future wider world and global landscape?

We used the outcomes of our consultation to co-produce our Vision statement with our pupils.

Our 3 Curriculum Drivers shape our Curriculum Offer and respond to the unique needs of our community:

Belonging - to teach our children about how to contribute successfully to being part of a group; to educate our children about being understanding, tolerant and accepting of other’s views and beliefs; and the power of associating with positive people, motivated by their intrinsic behaviours and attitudes

Possibilities – to inspire and enable our children to achieve their aspirations; and to respectfully challenge and question information and stereotypes

Impact – to teach our children that an action has a reaction, a response, a consequence and that this needs to be evaluated and considered before deciding to act

Our coherently planned academic Curriculum Offer also affords bespoke flexibility to meet the needs of individual children and cohorts. Underpinned by our 3 Drivers, our Offer sets out:

a) a clear list of the breadth of topics that will be taught;

b) curriculum concepts which pupils should know and understand by given points in their learning journey;

c) yearly assessment expectations as set out in our Trust-wide Progression and STEPs documents

Curriculum Breadth

The breadth for each subject and year group ensures each teacher has clarity as to what to teach and when to teach it to maximise knowledge transference. As well as providing the key subject knowledge, it also provides pupils’ with growing cultural capital through connections beyond the subject.

Curriculum Concepts

Curriculum Concepts are the key disciplinary aspects of each subject. They are chosen to build conceptual understanding within subjects and are repeated and developed many times in each topic.

Sustained Mastery

LEARNING MUST NOT BE RUSHED. It involves a high degree of planned repetition and development so that knowledge is secure in pupils’ long-term memory and can then be applied accurately in unfamiliar contexts. Once core knowledge is learned, teachers then facilitate extended knowledge to secure greater depth. Knowledge in long term memory is secured through a combination of planned and sequenced procedural, episodic and semantic experiences (tasks and memories).

Nothing is learned unless it is transferred and stored in a person’s long-term memory. This does not happen, and cannot be assessed, in the short term. Assessment, therefore answers two main questions:

• ‘How well are all pupils engaging with curriculum content? And,
• ‘How well are all pupils retaining and increasingly applying previously taught content over time?'

Implementation of Our Curriculum

This is based on evidence from research and cognitive science. Three main principles underpin it:

1) Learning is most effective with planned, spaced repetition. 

2) Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between themes and aids long-term retention and transference from information to knowledge over time and practise.

3) Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, increasing storage and retrieval strength.

In addition to these 3 principles, we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term and that sustained mastery takes time. Some of our content is subject specific, whilst other content is combined in a cross-curricular approach. Continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, replaces the teaching of some aspects of the curriculum and, in other cases, provides retrieval practice for previously learned content.

Our Implementation Drivers

We have used the following questions to shape our teaching delivery. 

• Do our children remember crucial knowledge taught previously?
• Do all teachers (teachers and teaching assistants) revisit previous content as if it is something new or do they embed what pupils already know?
• Is there evidence that all teachers carefully anticipate how new knowledge fits into the bigger picture or are lessons isolated incidents?
• Do all teachers use subject specific feedforward effectively and allow pupils to respond or act upon the feedforward to embed and extend subject knowledge and understanding?
• Do all teachers check for all children’s understanding accurately and use assessments to identify specific gaps in pupil’s prior knowledge and teach to these in order for the child to transfer short term information into long term knowledge?

Impact

Impact of our Curriculum, by end of an academic year, is measured by the vast majority of pupils having sustained mastery of the content; that is, they remember it; are fluent in it; and apply it.

Some pupils will have a greater depth of understanding and use non-routine, reasoned application of the learnt skills and knowledge.

We regularly monitor progress to ensure pupils are on track to reach the expectations of our curriculum.