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Curriculum Overview
The curriculum at Uplands Academy has been thoughtfully designed to enable all students to thrive across a broad range of subjects.
Our intention is that all children and young people, including those with special educational needs or disabilities and those who are disadvantaged or vulnerable in any way, are given every opportunity to acquire the knowledge, skills and cultural capital that will enable them to become active and positive participants in society now and later in their lives. Our curriculum leaders have carefully considered the purpose of each subject, its relevance to young people today and the essential knowledge and skills that are required for a happy and successful life beyond school.
Curriculum Implementation
We are proud of our teachers who are both knowledgeable and passionate about their subjects. Throughout a child’s education at Uplands Academy, we build their knowledge and skills year on year, equipping them with the understanding and expertise they need in order to take the next step in their education and future employment.
Our approach to teaching and learning is based on the Six Principles (Allison and Tharby, 2015). We ensure we pitch our lessons with an appropriate level of challenge.
Our explanations are clear and concise, and we believe that modelling how to do something is crucial to ensuring students make good progress.
Our learners are given opportunities to independently practice and we provide them with feedback so that they can become increasingly knowledgeable.
Questioning is a key part of our teaching and learning. All students are required to bring a mini whiteboard and pen to school so that every student can participate in responding to key questions.
We aim to provide students with opportunities to apply their knowledge and skills by working independently or collaboratively with their peers and we regularly assess and review what our students have remembered and understood. The information learnt from questioning and assessments is used by our teachers to plan the next sequence of lessons so that all students can experience success.
We have high expectations of every student and vary the level of challenge and support to ensure every child is supported to do their best. Where a student might have misunderstood a concept or be struggling to apply a skill, our teachers provide additional support and scaffolding in a variety of ways to help them make progress.
As a minimum, every subject fulfils the requirement of the National Curriculum. Our curriculum is planned and sequenced to build upon the knowledge and skills that students have secured, and to lead them towards the next steps in their development and education so that they can be happy, confident and successful in their future employment, and will contribute positively to the communities they live and work in. We achieve this through our four key curriculum aims: Prepare, Empower, Support, and Challenge.
At the heart of our curriculum is the idea of relationships: relationships between different groups of people and individuals, relationships between concepts, relationships between language, numbers, events and processes.
Whilst consistently striving for a better future, we believe we benefit from learning about the past. Each subject curriculum has been planned to introduce students to diverse writers, artists, mathematicians, scientists, designers, humanitarians, dreamers and thinkers who have shaped and changed our understanding of the world. By learning about influential and pioneering people who have advanced human knowledge and understanding across the curriculum, we aim to encourage students at Uplands Academy to be ambitious for excellence in all that they do.
As our school is located in a relatively small, rural community, we are particularly conscious of our responsibility to develop students’ worldview and their appreciation of the contributions of a wide range of people from around the world. There is, therefore, a thread of diversity, empathy and celebration of diverse cultures throughout the curriculum.
We have high expectations and ambitions for all our learners, including those with special needs and vulnerabilities. Our Key Stage 3 curriculum is taught for the full three years, meaning that every child at Uplands maintains the broadest possible curriculum for the longest possible time and we aim to provide a suitable range of KS4 options to meet the needs of every student.
During Year 9, students are provided with bespoke support and guidance to help them choose the subjects which are most appropriate for them in Key Stage 4. Through the Options process, we ensure that students maintain a broad and balanced curriculum whilst also supporting them in making personalised choices and ensuring that, where appropriate, students are encouraged to consider a set of subjects at GCSE that keeps their options open for further study and future careers.
Alongside our determination for students to achieve academic success as recognised in their qualifications, we expect our students to consistently demonstrate good manners, to be accepting of others, to be respectful and kind. These are the MARK Education Trust values.
Within each subject curriculum, we have identified where students will develop the personal attributes and skills that may not appear explicitly in examinations, but which we know to be important in participating positively in society including empathy, tolerance, communication, collaboration, leadership, resilience and critical thinking.
Additionally, we have considered how each curriculum area contributes to students' understanding of British Values and how we can support them in exploring spiritual, moral, social and cultural aspects of humanity as they develop a sense of their own unique identity.
Our Personal Development Curriculum has been carefully sequenced to enrich the subject curriculum by providing opportunities for students to learn about current events, mental health and wellbeing, classical and contemporary works of literature, dance and theatre, careers and national and international awareness events. The Personal Development Curriculum has been developed to introduce students to role models representing the protected characteristics in order to encourage them to celebrate diversity and develop empathy and compassion.
We prioritise the fundamental skills that enable us to communicate effectively: reading, writing, oracy, and numeracy. We believe that reading fluently, writing accurately, speaking confidently and developing an understanding of number are fundamental human rights, and key to active citizenship, confidence, and success.
Students are encouraged to express their ideas using Standard English and all teachers contribute to students’ developing communication skills by modelling literacy and numeracy skills across the curriculum.
As teachers, we strive to ensure that all our students, regardless of their starting points, continually make progress, gain more knowledge and improve their skills. We support our students to become more confident and successful by teaching high-quality lessons which have a clear purpose and strategies in place to engage and motivate our students.
Through carefully assessing students' knowledge and skills, we identify any gaps they may have and plan future learning with the intention of ensuring students' gain the knowledge and understanding they need to progress further.
By collaborating as a team of professionals, we support each other in creating consistency for our students. This helps students to feel secure, happy and confident.
Using current educational research as our starting point, our curriculum has been carefully constructed by each department to ensure the knowledge and skills that students need for their future success are introduced, revisited, assessed, embedded and extended through clear explanations, skillful task-setting, targeted questioning and regular feedback.
We have two assessment points each year throughout KS3 for most subjects (some subjects only have one a year because students have fewer lessons in that subject). We call these endpoints our CKAs (Curriculum Knowledge Assessments). The CKAs are carefully designed by HODs to check that students have learnt and remembered the key knowledge that has been taught.
Our curriculum builds towards clearly identified endpoints in every subject. Our subject leaders have identified exactly what the students will know and be able to do at every endpoint. We call these our “I Know and I Can’ statements. These statements are shared with both students and parents so that they can prepare effectively for every endpoint assessment.
The curriculum documents on the website are regularly evaluated and improved by subject leaders. They provide an overview of what each child is learning at each stage of their education, including the knowledge and skills they will acquire, as well as the essential vocabulary they will learn and the personal skills and attributes they will be encouraged to develop.
Please contact the relevant Head of Subject if you have any questions about the subject curriculum.
If you have any general questions regarding the curriculum, please contact the Deputy Headteacher, Mrs Richards, lrichards@uplands-academy.org