Our Curriculum
Our Vision
Our vision is Students First: Raising Standards and Transforming Lives. To achieve this vision, we provide an ambitious first-class educational experience for every child who attends our inclusive primary and secondary academies believing the quality of education a child receives empowers their future choices and life chances.
Our Ambitious Intent
The power of our inclusive curriculum rests in our determination that all children enjoy a wide range of subjects and experiences. For young people attending our primary and secondary academies we provide an accessible and enjoyable educational experience that ensures academic success, develops life-long skills, and offers rich experiences. An Outwood education supports every child and young person to grow as well-rounded and responsible citizens who can fulfil their potential and ability to play a positive role in society.
Across our curriculum each year is designed to build to the next. Curriculum planning focuses core and subject content knowledge and skills to aid our students’ knowledge recall, build their subject fluency and deepen their understanding. Expert curriculum planning across all subjects as well as wider curriculum aspects such as Relationship, Sex and Health Education, Fundamental British Values etc ensures we clearly define what children learn across each year and throughout their time at Outwood. Our knowledge rich curriculum supports our students to access their next steps in education at every level as we believe the longer one continues in education and/or training the greater the reward in health, happiness and social mobility.
Our ambitious curriculum matches the demands of the National Curriculum at each stage so that our students can meet and exceed age related national expectations and progress well to their next phase of education. Across our curriculum we clearly map our expectation of the rich knowledge, skills and understanding that are required in each subject. Teachers effectively adapt schemes of learning to meet the needs of students in their classes. Across the wide range of subjects offered we robustly plan our progressive delivery to best secure our students’ learning and academic achievement. We value the importance of the primary programmes of study and secondary core and EBacc subjects etc and ensure our students’ entitlement to these is strong. At secondary and sixth form we bespoke our curriculum architecture model locally to each academy balancing breadth and depth with context. This approach ensures flexibility whilst taking into consideration any local or regional influences alongside parent and student choice and needs within our offer and design.
The quality of our Trust’s curriculum was praised by Ofsted in its Summary Evaluation of our Trust in June 2019:
“An extensive curriculum review, involving staff from schools across the Trust, has resulted in a knowledge-rich curriculum model which extends from early years to post-16. This matches the demands of the national curriculum at relevant key stages. While there is a Trust-wide expectation of the knowledge and understanding that is required in each subject, there is also autonomy for subject leaders and teachers to adapt schemes of learning to meet the needs of pupils in each school. Trust leaders are ambitious for the academic achievement of pupils in a wide range of subjects. A higher-than-average proportion of pupils, study humanities, the arts and languages at key stage 4. Year-on-year, the proportion of pupils studying the EBacc is increasing.”
Claire Brown Senior Her Majesty’s Inspector
We know that great schools are only sustainable within happy and healthy communities and that we must all work together to tackle the causes of under-acheivement and disadvantage. We work hard to ensure that our curriculum is rooted in our communities and goes hand-in-hand with our aims of being a family of inclusive academies in the heart of their communities where all children are cared for and where standards are raised and lives transformed. Curriculum is a central aspect of our Transformative One Outwood Education Model that underpins the quality of education our academies provide.
Our Curriculum Aims
The high-quality education experience we provide is empowered by our ambitious, knowledge-rich curriculum that enables all children and young people to achieve well. We aim through our curriculum to narrow gaps in achievement for all student groups, enable access and prepare our children and young people well for their future steps. Our curriculum aims to support our students’ learning to flourish by:
Fostering an inclusive culture of responsibility, respect and safety with an ethos of praise, pride and purpose
Providing excellent teaching across a broad and balanced range of subjects to engage our learners
Promoting mental wellbeing encouraging positive relationships and acceptance
Encouraging healthy lifestyle choices, self-regulation and personal accountability
Appreciating diversity and difference and valuing tolerance, democracy, liberty and law
Recognising issues that affect our world and acknowledging actions that can be taken
Supporting students’ ambitions, and interests to open future study and career pathways
The work of our Trust was recognised by the Minister State (Education):
“Similarly, we can look at the work of leading multi-academy trusts such as Outwood Grange Academies Trust, which time after time radically improves schools that have had a long history of entrenched failure. That MAT provides long-neglected communities in this country with the transformational education that they need."
Education and Attainment of White Working-Class Boys, Nick Gibb Excerpts,12th February 2020
Our Culture and Ethos
Our primary, secondary and post 16 academies foster a welcoming culture of safety, responsibility and respect teaching students these values to secure a positive climate where all members of our school community feel safe, comfortable, and accepted. We believe our students are more able to do well and achieve their full potential when they share and experience this positive supportive climate. Within this climate all relationships are founded in mutual acceptance and inclusion. This is modelled by all so that our culture of respect becomes the norm and our ethos of praise, pride and purpose allows students' learning to flourish. These values are built into our wider curriculum delivery.
Our Curriculum Experience
Across each phase, our curriculum is designed to be broad and ambitious reflecting national curriculum and qualification expectations. Our provision enables students to hone their literacy and numeracy skills; deepen their subject study and support their personal growth across their schooling. Our well sequenced schemes of work clearly identify what students should know and be able to do by the end of each unit, term, year and stage in preparation for their next steps. Assessment is used to address gaps in students’ knowledge and understanding to best secure key concepts, core knowledge and skills to move students’ learning forward.
Our curriculum design is localised to our academies ensuring it best meets the needs of our students and supports the social and economic priorities of our locality. We build local interest into subject topics and promote relevant local focuses and issues that reflect our aims. Each academy will personalise its curriculum architecture to best structure key stages, subject delivery, time allocations, qualification pathways and staffing to ensure the curriculum implementation puts our student first, raises standards and transforms lives.
Future Focused
We believe sustainability is now an essential natural part of 21st-century education. Our Trust strives to act in an ethical, transparent and responsible way and we provide academy and Trust-wide events to highlight issues and engage our students in considering and responding to our shared future practice.
To learn more about curriculum for our primary and secondary academies, please click on the buttons below:
