Curriculum Intent
Our curriculum is intended to improve the life chances and opportunities of our students. It is designed to match the aspirations of our community but also to give our students a transformative experience through a broad and knowledge-rich curriculum. We believe that knowledge empowers: it gives students the confidence to learn more, think both critically and creatively, and to be able to participate in society. Our curriculum is designed to prepare students for university which is the goal that most of our students and parents want to achieve.
Our curriculum is underpinned by the following principles in order to achieve excellence:
- Knowledge-rich
- Thoughtfully sequenced; lesson by lesson, year by year
- Increasing in depth and complexity
- Academic, rigorous and challenging
- Consolidation through frequent and systematic review
Achieving excellence
How does the Paddington Curriculum achieve excellence?
Excellence is one of the three core values at Paddington. We strive for excellence in all we do, every day. Within our school and wider community, we promote excellence through the attitude of being better today than we were yesterday.
In order to achieve academic excellence, an individual needs to securely grasp knowledge that they can independently apply through skills that are specific to the subject. To achieve excellence is to reach a high level of proficiency that allows for fluency. At Paddington, we aim for each student to achieve excellence within all the subjects they study as this will lead students to develop their appreciation and passion for the subject and be equipped to study further.
The curriculum is methodically sequenced to ensure knowledge and skills build in a logical order. This enables strong foundations for knowledge to continually build, increasing in depth and complexity.
The curriculum provides clarity for progression. Teachers understand the learning journey students need to follow in order to achieve excellence – within a lesson, cycle of learning, across key stages and beyond the academy. As a result, students learn more, remember more and are able to do more.
The curriculum allows for frequent and systematic reviews of student learning. Formative and summative assessments are mapped within the curriculum to provide staff with regular opportunities to assess progress and understanding, and address misconceptions and errors through feedback and re-teaching.