Newbury School Curriculum & Education Delivery Plan

At Newbury School we are all about helping everyone reach their potential. We have an inclusive culture striving for the very best outcomes for children in our care. We passionately believe that education has the power to open doors and change lives. We understand our students and, in some cases, their difficult context, which encourages us to apply Maslow’s hierarchy of needs before implementing Bloom’s taxonomy. Fundamental to our curriculum is the method of delivery using a relationship model. We understand that our students may not be academically inclined, but we are no less ambitious for our students in terms of their curriculum engagement and potential.

At the heart of our education is a rich curriculum. We aim to inspire and empower students through our curriculum, which is delivered with consistently good lessons.

Our entire approach is centralised around our founding principles and ethos of:

Honesty I Integrity I Transparency I Consistency

Our school core values are assimilated from these founding principles, and we aim to ensure every student, parents and members of the school community understand that our values are C-A-R-E.

Communicate – Apply – Respect – Educate

The pillar of our curriculum is built around our core values, and they dictate our school wide curriculum intent and vision.

Curriculum intent

The KS3, KS4 and KS5 curriculum at Newbury school has been developed to teach students the most powerful knowledge in each subject area. Alongside teaching of the academic curriculum, we support the inculcation of equality, inclusion and interaction through a carefully crafted pastoral programme. The skills and knowledge gained through the academic curriculum which also encourages students to explore community and enterprise is essential to enable our students to be empowered and contribute to society.

Recent times have shown the need for everyone to build a sense of resilience in dealing with a global pandemic. Resilience is developed in our curriculum, where lessons are sequenced in a structured manner enabling students to build on prior knowledge, as well as synthesise across topics and subjects. Although a linear approach is present in the curriculum, a network of links can be drawn between themes, topics and subjects to show why certain topics are covered at certain times in the academic calendar. This is carefully constructed to fully support our student’s ability to internalise the knowledge gained across all subjects.

We believe that the choices we make about the content we provide and the order we present it are crucial. They make a big difference to how students can develop effective schema, retain and recall knowledge and skills in long-term memory. We actively promote knowledge transference from short term to long-term memory using regular retrieval practice. We understand the complex needs of our pupils and appreciate there are significant gaps in their knowledge built up over time as cumulative dysfluency sets in. Newbury school ensures that every lesson in every topic is recapped, and students are given the opportunity to recall knowledge and fill knowledge gaps. This activity is structured into the timetable as intervention throughout the week.

We have high expectations of what the students at Newbury can achieve. To help our students to have successful outcomes, the most powerful substantive and procedural knowledge is carefully selected to ensure that the curriculum is knowledge rich and ambitious. We want to promote life-long learning and provide our students with the cultural capital needed to become excellent global citizens.

In keeping with our inclusion pillar, we believe every student should have access to the same breadth of curriculum. Carefully selected scaffolding is used for all students to reach equally challenging learning goals and have secure skills and knowledge in each subject.

As part of building resilience, we believe all students should be challenged and seek deeper knowledge and understanding. Embedded within the curriculum are opportunities for students to deepen their understanding using the blue box challenge. These activities provide the opportunity for the students to think more extensively or consider different applications of the substantive and disciplinary knowledge they have been introduced to.

Assessment opportunities are carefully planned so that they are purposeful and support learning. Information from assessment supports our evaluation of the effectiveness of our curriculum content and implementation. Assessments include low stake knowledge retrieval quizzes, end of composite assessment and GL assessments including mid-term assessments. Students are encouraged to take pride in their assessment and demonstrate their learning over time. Assessments are collated and students make them visible in their subject books.

Our curriculum pillars in the classroom:

The Newbury Lesson

Knowledge retrieval starter / Hook activity

The starter activity is usually a low stakes knowledge retrieval quiz based on the previous lesson.
The task should take no more than 10 minutes including review and should be done in quiet conditions.
Answers to each question must be reviewed using targeted questioning.

The cycle: The lesson should be ‘chunked’ into cycles.
- Teach/model – A process or concept is modelled focusing on knowledge – ‘I do’
- Application – An opportunity for students to apply their knowledge and draw links to help prepare, success, embed promote and achieve. – ‘We do’ and ‘You do’. The teacher needs to complete a collective demonstration of the topic, substantive or disciplinary knowledge with the students during the ‘we do’ phase. The ‘You do’ phase needs to be the phase where the students are independently applying what they have learnt. Appropriate scaffolding is required to support students and SEN requirements need to be considered. The task should be differentiated by outcome not by objective.
- Assessment for Learning – Learning is assessed through targeted questioning, learning checks, and test questions. Misconceptions are addressed and future lesson planning is informed.
- The learning cycle may be repeated throughout the lesson to ensure effective ‘chunking’
Blue Box Challenge
- Each learning cycle will feature a blue box challenge.
- This is not a ‘do more’ task but an opportunity for students to extend thinking, deepen knowledge and build resilience. The complex needs of our students enables this challenge to be an opportunity to fill knowledge gaps and synthesis topics across the curriculum.
Plenary
- The plenary is an opportunity to assess key substantive knowledge and procedural knowledge and student outcomes.
- A plenary task may be early exposure to past exam paper questions, an inverse thinking task or a debate style discussion, which links the topic to community and enterprise.

Every lesson needs to finish with an ‘Exit Ticket’ for students to demonstrate learning.

Implementation of the curriculum

Curriculum planning documents

Long term plan: Each department details their high-level plan and overarching subject curriculum intent in the long term plan.

Intent Statement - The intent statement explains the ‘big ideas’ that each subject will consider and is the basis for all subsequent curriculum choices. It considers the disciplinary and substantive knowledge that will be developed, and the cohering strands that will thread the curriculum. Each subsequent curriculum choice promotes learning over time and the development of the students’ ling-term schema.

Medium Term Plan: The medium-term plan also referred to as schemes of work, detail how blocks of the content are broken down into sequences of learning, using the composite and component structure. The diagram below shows a typical composite and component structure:

The medium-term plan outlines precisely and in meticulous detail what the pupils will be learning. It will detail the declarative (‘Students will know that….’) and procedural (‘Students will know how to…’) knowledge.

How will we assess the impact of the curriculum?

Work Scrutiny: To assess

The progress of learning over time
The progress of the curriculum priorities
The quality of students’ work
The impact of student intervention and SEN requirements of students

Learning Walks: To support

The quality of teaching and learning identifying strengths and development opportunities
The impact of whole school CPD / Coaching
The effectiveness of student interventions
Opportunities for development

Stakeholder’s voice: To listen

To the opinions of all stakeholders
To any new ideas or any concerns or barriers to learning and teaching

Assessment Data: To identify

Gaps in students’ knowledge through use of QLA data
Opportunities to address and develop the curriculum further
Any learning gaps and student’s knowledge retention skills

Lind Management: To consistently