Curriculum and Learning

Our aim is to provide an excellent education which prepares our students for success in life.  

Our curriculum is expertly designed to provide children with the powerful knowledge they need for success in education and later life. We use the United Learning Curriculum, which is academically rigorous and expertly sequenced to maximise students’ cognitive development, to develop the whole person and the talents of the individual.  

We also strive to develop students’ cultural capital: the essential knowledge that pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said and helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement (DFE).  

• Entitlement: All pupils have the right to learn what is in the United Learning Curriculum, and schools have a duty to ensure that all pupils are taught the whole of it.   
• Coherence: Taking the National Curriculum as its starting point, our curriculum is carefully sequenced so that powerful knowledge builds term by term and year by year. We make meaningful connections within subjects and between subjects.   
• Mastery: We ensure that foundational knowledge, skills and concepts are secure before moving on. Pupils revisit prior learning and apply their understanding in new contexts. 
• Adaptability: The core content – the ‘what’ – of the curriculum is stable, but schools will bring it to life in their own local context, and teachers will adapt lessons – the ‘how’ – to meet the needs of their own classes. 
• Representation: All pupils see themselves in our curriculum, and our curriculum takes all pupils beyond their immediate experience. 
• Education with character: Our curriculum - which includes the taught subject timetable as well as spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, our co-curricular provision and the ethos and ‘hidden curriculum’ of the school – is intended to spark curiosity and to nourish both the head and the heart.   

Subject specialism is at the heart of our curriculum, which allows subject expertise to develop over time, and we are careful to provide sufficient time for teachers of the same subject to plan together and collaborate.   

Further subject specialism is provided by United Learning’s subject advisers. These advisers are subject experts who help teachers link the subject discipline to our pupils’ daily experience in the classroom. Subject advisers meet regularly with Heads of Department across United Learning and provide curriculum resources to support the implementation of the subject curriculum.   

Our approach to teaching and learning supports our curriculum by ensuring that lessons build on prior learning and provide sufficient opportunity for independent practice. Our lessons typically follow a simple instructional core:   

The independent practice phase of the lesson is especially important, as it is in this phase that pupils think hard and produce work that is the product of their own thinking.   

Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction provide us with a shared understanding of the characteristics of effective teaching. These principles support the implementation of the curriculum by ensuring that pupils regularly recall prior learning. You will often see this at the start of our lessons.   

“Each subject area has some set of facts that, if committed to long term memory, aids problem-solving by freeing working memory. Existing knowledge and skills can then be applied to new contexts.” Deans for Impact, The Science of Learning, 2016  

Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) techniques such as ‘cold calling’ and ‘no opt out’ are the practical application Rosenshine’s Principles in the classroom.   

We are particularly conscious of the role that literacy and vocabulary play in unlocking the whole curriculum. Our teachers explicitly teach the meaning of subject-specific language, and we expect lessons to contain challenging reading and writing. Knowledge organisers provide students with key information that they are expected to learn and recall with fluency, enabling them to develop their understanding of key concepts outside of their lessons.   

With thousands of pupils across United Learning following the same curriculum, we have been able to develop common assessments in most subjects. These are summative assessments which allow pupils to demonstrate their growing understanding of their subjects and enable teachers to assess the impact of their teaching. These summative assessments are typically taken once or twice a year, meaning that the majority of assessment that pupils experience is formative assessment from lesson to lesson (i.e. responsive teaching, as teachers systematically check for understanding of the components of each subject and adjust their teaching accordingly).   

The culmination of our curriculum is that pupils leave our school with the confidence and intelligence to thrive. We know our pupils as individuals which enables us to provide curriculum guidance and careers guidance throughout their time with us. We expect all pupils to leave our school with the grades required to progress to their desired destination, and the character required to flourish once they get there. By teaching our curriculum well, and delivering education with character, we bring out the best in everyone.