Curriculum overview

Welcome to Accrington Academy's Curriculum webpage, we believe “children’s learning is not a rehearsal” and so we are aiming to maximise the learning for your child in every year with us.

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Teaching and Learning Handbook 2024

Accrington Academy Curriculum Intention statement

Our intention is to provide an excellent education which brings out the best in all of our students and prepares them for success in education and life and achieves our mission statement of “building character, creating learners and transforming lives”.

We aim to provide an excellent education for all our students; an education which brings out the best in all of them and prepares them for success in life. We want all our students to “make progress which we define as “knowing more and remembering more”.

We aim to deliver a curriculum which equips children with powerful knowledge and nourishes the whole person and the talents of the individual to enable them to ‘enter into the conversation of mankind’ (Michael Oakeshott).

We believe in delivering “powerful knowledge” introducing them to “the best that has been thought and said” DFE national curriculum 2014.

Our Accrington curriculum is based on these 6 key principles which operate across United learning:

Entitlement:

All pupils have the right to learn what is offered in our curriculum , and we will 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 may be the United learning common curriculum in many subjects but we bring it to life in our own local context, and our teachers adapt lessons – to meet the needs of our own classes.

Representation:

All our pupils should see themselves in our curriculum, and our curriculum takes all our 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 extra-curricular provision, and the ethos and ‘hidden curriculum’ of the school – is intended to build character.

Christine Counsell describes curriculum as ‘content structured as narrative over time’. we aim to ensure that all our pupils experience a broad and ambitious curriculum that builds over time – week by week, term by term and year by year.

Accrington Academy Curriculum Implementation Statement

How we teach in order to expose our pupils to powerful knowledge and provide education with character

Subject specialism is at the heart of our curriculum and you will see differences in the way that the curriculum is constructed and assessed in different subjects.

Standardised written assessments, for example, play less of a role in performance subjects such as music and physical education. The stability of our curriculum 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 our teachers link the subject discipline to our pupils’ daily experience in the classroom. Subject advisers meet regularly with our Heads of Department and provide curriculum resources to support the implementation of the subject curriculum.

As a mastery curriculum our pupils study fewer topics in greater depth. A 3-year Key Stage 3 provides pupils with the time and space to gain a secure understanding that builds over time in each subject. In our lessons we expect to see all pupils grappling with the same challenging content, with teachers providing additional support for pupils who need it. Rather than moving on to new content, our higher attainers should be challenged to produce work of greater depth and flair.

Our approach to teaching and learning supports our curriculum by ensuring that lessons build on prior learning and provide sufficient opportunity for guided and independent practice. We use Barak Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction to develop our teaching practice. At the heart of Rosenshine’s principles is a simple instructional core:

• Explanation of new material in small steps (I)

• Guided practice with prompts and scaffolds (we)

• Independent practice with monitoring and feedback from teacher (you)

At each point in this instructional core, teachers check understanding of all pupils by asking lots of questions and providing feedback.

The Rosenshine 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 in our “Live in 5 starters” and at the end via our “exit tickets.” When prior learning is committed to long term memory it becomes fluent or ‘automatic’, freeing space in our working memory which can then be used for comprehension, application, and problem solving.

Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) techniques such as ‘cold calling’ and ‘right is right” are two whole school strategies we are aiming to embed to support our children’s oracy and involve them all in learning.

We recognize that early catch-up is essential: we aim to promptly identify and support pupils who start secondary school without a secure grasp of reading, writing and mathematics so that they can access the full curriculum.

Accrington Academy Curriculum Impact Statement

How we measure and secure continuous improvement for all

Working with United learning, 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 twice a year In January and June, allowing teachers to focus on formative assessment from lesson to lesson. These assessments are used primarily to identify gaps in core knowledge and to enable responsive teaching which is informed by the assessments and to reteach areas which we feel require more delivery.

We believe that it is this “formative assessment that is key to children knowing more and remembering more.” We use a range of strategies to assess children every day and to ensure we respond to this and it informs our teaching.

We are particularly conscious of the role that literacy and vocabulary plays 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.

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. We see this destination data as exceptionally important in measuring the success of our curriculum over time.

By teaching our curriculum well, and delivering education with character, we bring out the best in everyone and “transform lives”