Curriculum Overview

Bridgemary School Curriculum Intent Statement

What is our overarching curriculum intent including links to TKAT 'achieving more together’ and what do you intend students leave Bridgemary School with?

Our curriculum supports our Trust ambition of ‘achieving more together.  We do this by offering an exciting, broad and balanced curriculum that aims to provide all students with the core and facilitating knowledge and skills that enable them to leave our school academically, socially and morally successful. We intend that, by experiencing this curriculum, all students who leave Bridgemary School have the qualifications, skills, knowledge and character to access aspirational Post-16 opportunities and to lead a life that includes positive relationships, resilience and financial independence.

Our ambition for all students, including those most able, PP and those with SEND, is that they are fluent in the core knowledge for all of their subjects. For those students with SEND this may require additional scaffolding and strategies that are shared with staff through 'pen profiles'.

How do we ensure that the curriculum is designed effectively?

Our core mission for our curriculum is for it to be precise and promote progress in all subjects, regardless of ability. Our “Precision Curriculum” is underpinned by 3 strands: 

• Banding - allows students to look up and improve, both with teacher support and independently. 
• Topic overviews - highlight declarative and procedural knowledge for students, as well as address misconceptions
• Planned pieces - offers opportunities for students to receive routine feedback and progress as well as identifying gaps in knowledge

What is the structural intent of the subject curriculum, & how is it sequenced so that students know and remember more?

The curriculum across all subjects is carefully sequenced so that prior core declarative and procedural knowledge is built upon, with continual opportunities for core knowledge to be interleaved throughout both key stages so that students know more, remember more and can apply that knowledge in a range of contexts.  Facilitating knowledge adds important local, national, and global context to core knowledge, and our curriculum intends to provide a richness and diversity that enables our students to experience learning in real-life contexts.

How do any school values and focuses influence or feed through the curriculum?

 The school curriculum is built on 4 values to ensure our students receive and are able to access it fully, those being:

• Reading and comprehension that aims to ensure all students leave with a reading age at least equivalent to their chronological age
• Our school ethos of Be Kind, Work Hard, Be the Best Version of Yourself 
• A deepening understanding of core and facilitating knowledge that enables students to know and remember more
• A wide appreciation of the world that we live in, and the celebration of the diversity this brings

What is our intent to assess how well students access the curriculum and how the school intends to adapt the curriculum to close gaps in knowledge?

To ensure any gaps in prior or new knowledge are quickly identified, we check progress frequently through a range of assessment opportunities, from lesson-by-lesson declarative knowledge tests, planned pieces that assess knowledge retention and application, to more cumulative common assessments that assess students’ ability to remember and apply knowledge in a range of contexts.  The information from these assessments are used to adapt the curriculum in order to quickly close gaps in knowledge and keep students on track to achieve their very best.

What curriculum do we intend students to access at each key stage, that ‘at least’ meets the requirements of the national curriculum, and what is your ambition for students by the end of each Key Stage?

At KS3 students access all subjects within the ‘basic’ curriculum and our school curriculum meets and often extends National Curriculum requirements, lasting for 3 years to ensure breadth and depth.  We are ambitious in what we expect students to achieve during this key stage and aspire for all our students to make strong progress from their entry points to the school that enables them to confidently access level 2 courses at KS4.

At KS4, we intend that all students continue to follow a broad ‘basic’ curriculum over 2 years building on the breadth of experience at KS3.  All students have the option of studying the suite of EBacc subjects and our intention is that we annually increase the number of students achieving EBacc in order to contribute to our own and the governmental ambition for EBAcc study.  Students and their parents/carers receive careful guidance to help them select focus subjects in addition to the basic curriculum, to ensure the highest education pathways post GCSE studies.

How does the co-curriculum enhance the curriculum?

The main school curriculum is enhanced by extensive co-curricular opportunities in areas of sports, the Arts, catch-up sessions, wellbeing, visits to places of interest and visitors coming into our school.

Implementation 

In order to fulfil these ideals, our five-year through-curriculum model requires pupils to engage with a wide range of subjects in Year 7 to 9 and then provides a more bespoke approach through our “options routes” in Years 10 and 11. You can read more about how the curriculum is organised in each school year below. For a more detailed overview of the topics taught in each discipline, please see the individual subject pages.