_{The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you. (BB King)}

In order to serve our students with the best that education has to offer, they are taught in four 85 minute blocks of time each day, with three periods taking place on a Friday, over a two-week timetable.  On a Monday afternoon, all students engage in a weekly enrichment/club of their choosing which lasts for 50 minutes.

Our curriculum offer is reviewed annually in line with statutory requirements and recommendations from external agencies.  Decisions are made based on the needs of our students in each year group, as we recognise that each separate cohort will have different strengths and weaknesses.

The curriculum for each Key Stage can be selected from the menu.  Details of individual subjects can be viewed on our Subjects page.  Our full curriculum document can be found in our Key Information area.  For further information, please contact Mr. James Lynn at the Academy.

All students are equally valued at our Academy, and we strive to eliminate prejudice and discrimination whilst developing an environment where all students can flourish and feel safe.  

Rationale

At HAF we believe that curriculum is the lived experience of students at our academy.

Our curriculum has been designed to equip our young people with the powerful knowledge and skills they need to unlock the world academia as well as the broader world around them. Their learning will be grounded in an understanding of the best of what has been thought and said across different disciplines and how that paints a picture of the entirety of the human condition. At the core of our young people being able to make sense of and make a contribution to the world around them is having the reading, writing, listening and oracy skills to make them effective recipients and producers of knowledge. They will also develop the empathy they need to be good citizens and contribute towards the common good.

Young people enter HAF with a wide range of needs and experiences. Our approach has been developed to meet the needs of all our young people and enrich their lives.

Our curriculum has been shaped to reflect the ethos, aims and values of our academy.

Serve, Support, Success

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Intent

Serving our young people with a challenging curriculum helps to equip them with the skills, ambition, confidence and cultural capital to work creatively and to transfer and apply knowledge in different contexts towards new and valuable goals. It supports our young people with creative, critical and reflective thinking and produces excited, enthusiastic, enquiry-driven and independent learners.

Our young people have success because our curriculum is planned to:

· be memorable and built on powerful disciplinary and substantive knowledge

· deliver challenging content that ensures our young people achieve academic success

· enable our young people to develop empathy and understanding so they can be active citizens as well as critical thinkers

· have a strong focus on literacy, including opportunities to read, write, speak, debate, discuss and question across a range of styles and subjects

· be broad, balanced and explore the human condition, making links to prior learning, knowledge and skills so that the learning is meaningful

· encourage children to make values-based decisions, regardless of external influences

· hold cultural capital that enhances learning across the broader curriculum

· be flexible and allow us to respond to personal, local and national events.

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Implementation

Our curriculum is implemented through serving an appropriate balance and weighting of teaching time across subjects in different key stages, high-impact teaching of powerful disciplinary knowledge and skills and innovative approaches to support our students’ retention of what has been taught.

An essential part of what constitutes powerful knowledge is how we develop students’ literacy skills in all subjects. We have common approaches for reading, writing and oracy which are used by all areas such as explicit vocabulary teaching and self-abridgement. To support reading we assess using the NGRT platform and provide three levels of support (universal, targeted and specific) depending on need. The latter approach is facilitated by our SEND team and involves the explicit teaching of phonics.

All lessons at the academy are 85 minutes long and scheduled on a two-week timetable to allow complete coverage of the National Curriculum while still cultivating the depth of learning that is essential to the progress our young people make.

Ties are also made within lessons to the human condition how that tells a narrative to our young people about what it means to be human and how the subject they have been studying makes a contribution to that.

Further information about the allocation of periods can be found on our website as well as the range of subjects available at Key Stage Four and Five.

At HAF we promote and train our teachers in the five key principles of teaching: aspirational behaviour, clarity of instruction, making it remembered, responsive teaching, high quality feedback and curriculum comprehension; these principles form the basis of our teaching and learning development at a whole academy level. We know that it is essential that our teachers have the subject knowledge relevant to their curriculum areas and how to best pass that knowledge on. Therefore, all our teachers are supported in the development of subject expertise and curriculum leaders work extensively on how to support their teams in developing subject specific delivery skills.

Assessment is a core component of our curriculum implementation. We use summative assessment where we feel that there is value, such as at key end point in the curriculum but it should not be an essential component of our students learning experience. We prioritise understanding what our students know and what they can do, not what level or grade they are at and therefore we frequently use formative assessment. This formative assessment relies on teachers assessing the powerful knowledge that is in their taught curriculum. In Key Stage Three, students complete fortnightly quizzes on the knowledge that they have acquired, which then forms the basis of intervention and teaching moving forward. These knowledge quizzes compliment the in-class strategies that are instilled in teaching at Key Stage Four and Five. We recognise that students have different starting points and using formative assessment in this way helps us to use intervention to plug those gaps.

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Impact

The impact of our curriculum is monitored throughout the year by the Vice Principal with responsibility for curriculum and the Assistant Principal with responsibility for curriculum in a range of ways including:

• data analysis from summative assessment
• Subject Insight Reviews (SIRs)
• looking at our young people’s work and other evidence of outcomes
• lesson observations and learning walks
• feedback from children
• feedback from teachers