3.9 Curriculum Principles

What? At Hartland High School, our taught curriculum is carefully designed to give students the knowledge needed to succeed in their GCSE and A Level exams. This will give students the best chance to climb their own personal mountains to the very best universities in the country or the career of their choosing.

How? We teach a curriculum that has been carefully curated by our Heads of Department in collaboration with other GLT schools and subject leads. Lessons are focused on powerful knowledge, taught by subject specialists in a rigorous and academic fashion. Knowledge has been selected to ensure students appreciate the depth and complexity of key ideas in each subject; this includes subject specific vocabulary and key disciplinary skills. We believe that this provides a firm grounding and preparation for successful futures – students will understand the world and their context and be able to relate to people from all walks of life. The curriculum has been sequenced to enable these ideas to be built on each year and for key concepts to be revisited, strengthening students’ understanding of them. 

Our core routines in lessons ensure that students are taught this thoroughly: they learn it and this knowledge is retained. Our approach is rooted in cognitive science and best practice from some of the best schools in the country. Lessons are structured in a consistent way and everyone at HHS, students and adults, have a shared language and approach to learning and ensure that participation and thinking ratios are as high as they can be. This makes expectations very clear and ensures we make the best use of lesson time. Disruption to learning is not tolerated and silence is the default in our classrooms. This silence is liberating and allows students to concentrate and think. We expect every child to think hard about the right things in lessons 100% of the time. 

We constantly check how well students learn – we ask them questions, use mini whiteboards, and circulate to monitor every child’s progression through the curriculum and to review our own planning. We are ambitious for our students – we hold them to extremely high standards because we know that they can meet them. We believe that homework is important. It is planned and administered to consolidate and build on prior knowledge. We teach strategies to revise that are built around the idea of the testing effect to ensure long-term retention of key knowledge.  

Our curriculum is not restricted to taught lessons. We teach students PSHE and British values and offer a wide variety of enrichment opportunities, including trips. We support all students and adapt our teaching to achieve this. Literacy is embedded into our curriculum. Our enrichment programme prepares students for further study or work and helps them grow into good people. We believe that this enables students to live our values each day - Work Hard, be Kind. 

Our curriculum aims to educate, empower and challenge all our students. We make all curriculum decisions based on the following five guiding principles:

1. Our curriculum is knowledge-rich.

2. We teach from shared resources, because the curriculum is the entitlement of all.

3. Our curriculum is ambitious for all students.

4. We follow a careful sequenced, spiral curriculum, to allow students to develop and deepen ideas over time.

5. Our curriculum promotes our school’s values and British values.

1. Our curriculum is knowledge-rich.

We believe in the importance of all our students learning and memorising knowledge. We know that powerful knowledge takes our students beyond the confines of their own experience, broadens their minds and challenges their thinking. 

We subscribe to the belief, borne out in educational research, that ‘skills’ are domain specific, and that having knowledge available at your fingertips is empowering, exciting, motivating and enabling for students.

We do not make the mistake of being knowledge heavy. We recognise the limits of how much we can teach our students, and the need to prioritise depth alongside breadth. For this reason, we select carefully what we teach and guard against the mistake of attempting to teach too much content with insignificant mastery.

2. We teach from shared resources, because the curriculum is the entitlement of all.

All our students are entitled to the same curriculum, of the same quality, delivered in the same way. We recognise that inequity exists in schools where students receive a different standard of education from one classroom to the next. To guard against this, we teach from shared curriculum resources, the implementation of which is led by heads of department, but curation of which is a shared and collective responsibility. This enables a consistent approach to pedagogical methods within subject disciplines and it allows for a coherent sequencing of knowledge from year 7 to year 13. It also protects the teacher's workload, enabling focus on highly effective implementation. We recognise that collaboration is a core value for Greenshaw Learning Trust; we use the GLT curriculum where appropriate to create alignment within our family of schools and to enable meaningful collaboration between professionals, whether teachers, middle leaders or senior leaders.

3. Our curriculum is ambitious for all students.

We are determined that the end point for all students is that they have the choice to study at one of the best universities in the country, or that they are ready to embark on the career of their choosing. To achieve this, we require an ambitious curriculum. Our curriculum is never narrowed: we aim for all students, regardless of need, to study a full range of subjects, and we work to close gaps in reading and foundational numeracy through Direct Instruction intervention or synthetic phonics as early as possible. In order to be ambitious for all, it must also be inclusive, so we prioritise teaching strategies that benefit all students, but particularly students with SEND, in our curriculum implementation.

Our curriculum and course offer is based on the principle that we want to maximise choice and opportunity for our students. We teach a three-year Key Stage 3 to enable maximum breadth for the longest possible time. Our courses at Key Stage 4 are designed to cater to the diversity of students’ curiosity and interests, while avoiding premature narrowing of the curriculum that might limit students’ choices post-16. At sixth form, we offer a range of traditional academic subjects, to provide the foundational disciplinary knowledge that is required for success at university, while also offering a selection of level three BTEC qualifications that also enable access to higher education.

4. We follow a carefully sequenced, spiral curriculum, to allow students to develop and deepen ideas over time.

Our curriculum is designed following principles of cognitive science: we know that knowledge forms schemas in the brain that build up over time and that part of learning is forgetting and revisiting. While our curricula in different subjects are not repetitive and topics taught are discrete, they are designed to have threads or ‘big ideas’ running through them. This means that core disciplinary knowledge, that is built cumulatively through the curriculum, is strategically revisited in order to deepen students’ understanding and achieve greater levels of mastery each year.

5. Our curriculum promotes our school’s values and British values.

The school’s values ‘work hard, be kind’ are living and breathing in our curriculum. The curriculum teaches our students to work hard because of principles 1-3 above, which ensure the curriculum has exceptional rigour, challenge and ambition. The curriculum teaches our students to be kind by enabling them to think beyond their own experiences and have empathy for people in different situations. 

When selecting the content of the curriculum, we think carefully about alignment with British values, ensuring the curriculum teaches both a fundamental understanding of British history and culture, as well as a diversity of voices, ideas and perspectives.

Our curriculum also extends beyond the academic curriculum and is delivered through our Tutor Time Reading Programme, enrichment programme, character education offer and social times structures.