Our curriculum is much more than just lessons. It includes the ethos, attitudes and relationships which create the high-quality life in all our school. Our aim is to provide a broad, balanced and rigorous curriculum that meets the needs and aspirations of every young person to leave them well prepared for their future.
Goresbrook’s innovative curriculum is based on a set of key principles that takes the National Curriculum statements and shapes them in a way that ensures that all learners are challenged and engaged in their learning, and ready to join their next phase in education.
The principles are:
• A foundation of strong knowledge
• Opportunities to apply key skills across the curriculum
• Embedding knowledge and concepts in long-term memory
• Diverse learning outcomes for learners
• Engaging topics and content
• Interwoven values
• A strong focus on communication, literacy and numeracy skills
The curriculum is designed in a way that allows for a diverse range of outcomes for pupils that they may have to produce in their chosen careers later in life, e.g. a business proposal, a lab report, a presentation, or a critique. Using these outcomes, enables pupils to experience producing work that they may not be exposed to until much later in life. It also allows them to develop transferable skills which can be applied both across the curriculum, and in their future lives.
A focus for us has been enriching our curriculum offering to ensure that learning opportunities are purposeful and capture the excitement of our school family. Rich opportunities, such as our 'Ready, Steady, Cook' project, and our initiatives to involve the whole school community, such as ‘Science in my Kitchen’, have ignited a passion for learning in our pupils.
Our curriculum is reinforced through retrieval practice, which helps pupils to retain information more effectively. Recap sessions are built into the start of every lesson, both core and non-core. Often, we may think that children have learnt a piece of information, but we come to realise they struggle when they try to recall the answer. It’s precisely this “struggle” or challenge that improves memory and learning – by continually and consistently trying to recall information, we exercise or strengthen our memory, and we can also identify and target gaps in pupil learning.