We believe that students learn through having a broad, rich and deep experience of the world around them and that this cannot be achieved solely through sitting at a desk. This is why our curriculum is delivered through Enterprise Projects, which makes learning practical and meaningful and challenges our students to step outside their comfort zone and create something that they are proud of and passionate about.
We believe that education should contain a certain amount of risk, not to safety but risk of getting things wrong and trying again. Thomas Edison famously said that he needed to find 700 ways to not make a lightbulb before he found a way that worked. It is just this resilience that we feel is often lacking in education and therefore see failure as a learning opportunity, not something to be avoided. This reflective perspective is important for students in education but even more so in the world outside of school, where things often do not work out as planned on the first try.
Sometimes, when a student is struggling to engage with and make progress in school, their curriculum is narrowed. Instead, our approach is to seek to instead broaden and deepen each student’s curriculum, as we believe that through engagement with the world, they will discover more about themselves. They may find that they have a passion for arts or technology, but would not have known about it if their curriculum didn’t include opportunities to engage with these subjects. Therefore, our curriculum is structured to provide broad curriculum coverage, with pathways for students to deepen their knowledge within each subject area.
Children and young people today have inherited a world in which they have access to more knowledge than ever before; however, the knowledge curriculum is often delivered without context or sense of purpose. We have instead designed our knowledge-rich curriculum using Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy to support students to not just gain but apply and create knowledge. Our curriculum map covers the subjects of science, human and social, creative and aesthetic, physical, and technology and design education, with termly topics in each area. The curriculum spirals every three years, ensuring that students revisit and build on prior learning through a sequence of three progressive tiers of knowledge for each topic.
This curriculum structure allows us to build individualised pathways for each student that support ambitious progress across the curriculum in line with their individual strengths and needs.
