At Salford City Academy our curriculum intent aims to provide an excellent education for all our students; one that brings out the best in all students and prepares them for future successes in life. Our curriculum aims to foster a love of learning and create a high achievement culture, based on the acquisition of 'powerful knowledge' through which all students will emerge well-equipped to pursue exciting career choices and be successful in life. In order to best prepare students for this, we have a three-year Key Stage 3 curriculum to ensure that students are exposed to a wide variety of subject disciplines in appropriate depth before they personalise their curriculum through selecting option subjects for Year 10.
Our curriculum will liberate and empower. It will provide students with the confidence to understand and shape the world around them, to be active and economically self-sufficient citizens, and to "enter into the conversation of mankind." (Michael Oakeshott). Our curriculum is designed to develop the whole person and identify and foster individual talents, thereby combining academic rigour and a rich programme of personal development known as the Aspire Programme.
In order to help students achieve their full potential we have developed a knowledge-rich curriculum that:
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Is cohesive, cumulative and highly sequenced.
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Is academic, rigorous and challenging.
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Has been designed with long-term memory in mind; students’ knowledge, skills and understanding are cemented by frequent and systematic low-stakes testing, feedback, and revisiting.
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Is progressive in quality and quantity across the years and key stages and mapped in precise detail. This ensures consistency and a shared understanding of high learning expectations.
At Salford City Academy, we believe that the curriculum should act as a both a mirror and a window, allowing students to both see themselves within the curriculum and to see a world beyond their own immediate experience. The curriculum is therefore deliberately planned to capitalise upon links to both the local context and the context of the school community. Our curriculum explicitly teaches, promotes and reinforces the fundamental British Values both through discrete PSHE and Citizenship lessons and across curriculum subjects.
Salford City Academy is part of the United Learning group. Our curriculum is underpinned by the ‘Framework for Excellence’ that is at the heart of everything we do a United Learning. It sets out the key principles that we believe are vital to an excellent education for all children and young people. These principles are embedded through each key stage of the curriculum at Salford City Academy.
• Entitlement: All students have the right to learn what is in the Salford City Academy curriculum. It is our belief that access to the full curriculum is an inalienable entitlement of all of our students and therefore all students, including those with SEND and disadvantaged students, have equity of access to the powerful knowledge specified within the curriculum. Therefore the curriculum in each subject specifies the entitlement for all students, with the implementation being adapted as required to ensure that there is equal access to the curriculum for all students.
• Coherence: Taking the National Curriculum as its starting point, our curriculum is carefully sequenced so that powerful knowledge builds term by term and year by year. We make meaningful connections within subjects and between subjects.
• Mastery: We ensure that foundational knowledge, skills and concepts are secure before moving on. Students revisit prior learning and apply their understanding in new contexts.
• Adaptability: The core content – the 'what' – of the curriculum is stable, but we bring it to life in our local context, and teachers adapt lessons – the 'how' – to meet the needs of their own classes.
• Representation: All students see themselves in our curriculum, and our curriculum takes all students beyond their immediate experience.
• Education with Character: Our curriculum is intended to spark curiosity and to nourish both the head and heart. It includes the taught subject timetable as well as spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, our co-curricular provision and the ethos and ‘hidden curriculum’ of the school.
As part of our continued commitment to improving communication between the Academy and parents/carers, a half-termly letter will be sent out detailing the curriculum that students will be exposed to in each subject during that half-term.
Please do visit each subject curriculum page for a full outline of the programmes of study for each year group within each subject area.