Citizenship

What is our overarching curriculum intent and what do we intend students leave Bridgemary School with?

We intend that our curriculum supports our Trust ambition of ‘achieving more together’.  Citizenship Studies has been designed to enable learners to understand and appreciate key citizenship issues at home, in school and as young citizens in their wider community. It enables learners to understand what it means to be a citizen in today’s society in a practical way. Citizenship Studies will enable learners to deepen their knowledge of democracy and government, the law, rights and responsibilities and how we live together in society. It should enable students to acquire the knowledge, understanding and skills to take responsible citizenship actions, play a positive role in public and democratic life as informed and active citizens, and build the foundations for further learning and study.

Our curriculum is built around a spiral model, allowing students to build on the core knowledge that they develop over the course of their learning journey, which will be enhanced with facilitating knowledge, giving them context and extending their understanding. Procedural knowledge in the form of skills will be taught explicitly throughout the course, and built into the curriculum at regular intervals allowing students to reflect on their progress and identify areas in which they can improve further. This will equip students with the knowledge and skills necessary to progress through their education and into their GCSE examinations and beyond. The curriculum itself will equip students who leave us with a strong grounding in how the country they live in operates, how laws are made and enacted and what rights and responsibilities they have as citizens of the UK. It will also explore the concepts of identity both nationally and internationally and how understanding of such identities can influence relations among a country’s citizens and interactions with those who may seek asylum or refugee status. It will explore the diverse make-up of UK society and encourage students to build stronger moral characters ready to enter a multicultural and increasingly connected world.

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 aims 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

In Citizenship Studies we seek to fulfil these aims through a mixture of highly engaging and relevant content. Debating issues central to modern citizenship such as the moral justification for certain laws or rights will help build critical thinking skills as well as interpersonal, professional and presentation skills ready for a modern workplace. We hope to encourage students to take an active interest in how their government is run both locally and at a national level and see themselves as potential agents of change, not just passive bystanders. The Citizenship department will facilitate lessons with a positive climate for learning in which students will feel safe to contribute and develop their knowledge. In keeping with the subject they will improve their knowledge of the experiences of others, as well as the factors that have shaped the world around them, allowing them to leave the school as well rounded and informed individuals. Our curriculum is built around core knowledge and lessons are delivered in a way which allows students to engage with the core knowledge in order to know and remember more, whilst providing the facilitating knowledge to know and remember more in a wider context. By studying the Citizenship Studies curriculum we have designed, students will be given the tools and knowledge required to step into their place in a modern British society.. 

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, end of topic tests 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 curriculums intending to quickly close gaps in knowledge and keep students on track to achieve our ambitious academic progress.

The curriculum we intend to deliver to students at each Key Stage:

This course is conducted in a two year KS4 and does not have a KS3 component.It begins in year 10 and students start by studying Rights, Law and the Legal System in England and Wales. Using a range of resources including real world case studies, they will look at how the law works in this country and what their rights and responsibilities are within its bounds. Elements of debate and roleplaying of scenarios will be implemented during this unit to better put what they have learned into practice. Then, they will move onto democracy and government. In this unit, students will look at a brief history of the democratic process and how the various political parties operate as part of the British Parliament. This unit will also look at the role of Media in the political process and how the students themselves can get involved in politics. As part of this unit, and at the beginning of year 11, students will be introduced to their Citizenship Action project. This will see students select and develop their own project based on their learning by choosing a topic important to them. This can involve any number of topics such as charity work, getting involved in local council events and researching political and humanitarian topics at either a national or local level and put a range of conceptual and procedural knowledge learned during the course to practice in a meaningful way.. Finally, students will look at the UK and how it fits into the wider world. They will look at and discuss what identity means and how it can differ depending on social, political or religious backgrounds. The role the UK plays on the international stage in organisations such as NATO or the UN will also be considered with scope for Model UN clubs being created as after school activities.

How does the co-curriculum enhance the curriculum?

During their time at Bridgemary students will be given many opportunities to develop their co-curricular knowledge as well as being able to experience cultural capital in multiple forms. Students will be given the opportunity to interact with local government and local authority bodies in their Citizenship Action Projects as well as guest speakers from such bodies and related organisations being brought in to speak to students and develop their experience.