Curriculum

Our Curriculum Drivers

At Barnet Hill Academy, our curriculum drivers are:

• Academic excellence 
• Character development
• Building inclusivity 
• Connections with community  

We aim to ensure that all pupils have access to the curriculum and are not disadvantages by disabilities or special educational needs. 

Intent - What do we want our children to learn?

At Barnet Hill Academy, we want our children to excel academically across all National Curriculum subjects, to become curious learners and responsible members of the local, national, and global community.  We want to provide a solid foundation for our children, so that they become confident, articulate, and knowledgeable leaders of the future.  Key features of our curriculum:

• We are proud to be a multicultural school and we want our children to recognise, respect and celebrate different cultures, backgrounds and beliefs, preparing them for life in modern Britain.
• Nurture a strong spiritual connection with God.
• We provide a curriculum that encourages our children to become responsible, well-rounded, socially aware and confident citizens. We promote both good physical and good mental health, emphasising the need for our children to become self-motivated, self-directed and resilient learners.
• The curriculum is designed to foster thought, curiosity and a desire for learning in all our children, regardless of their starting points. By providing a relevant and personalised curriculum that reflects the London Borough of Barnet and the wider London area, all children, including disadvantaged children and those with special needs, will succeed within our intellectually challenging environment.
• Reading is fundamental to all learning. We want all our children to be excited about reading.  We build reading skills from the early years upwards, securing phonic knowledge rapidly and then developing essential comprehension skills.
• We develop a love for reading. Our texts are ambitious and motivating, supported by our CLPE initiative.
• We are highly ambitious for our children and emphasise academic success. We carefully design our curriculum to be broad, balanced and knowledge-rich, so that our children know more and remember more.  We plan for progression in knowledge, skills and understanding to prepare children for future success in education and careers.
• Our learning is coherent, with knowledge building on knowledge. We identify what we want our children to learn (composite knowledge and skills) and break this down into building blocks (component parts), with robust assessment ensuring that children know more and remember more.
• Our children learn through a traditional, discrete subject model and acquire subject-specific knowledge, with literacy underpinning everything we teach. We believe that this is the best way to prepare children for future learning.

We emphasise strong connections across subjects because we want our curriculum to be real and meaningful. Problem solving and application in the real world, including working with the local community to create enriching learning experiences, play a key part in our curriculum offer.

Implementation 

Our curriculum is driven by subject leaders, supported by the leadership team, to ensure that learning is sequenced and tailored to meet the needs of our children.  Key features of our curriculum implementation:

• All subjects are taught discretely. Our planning for learning carefully maps out the progression of skills, knowledge and understanding, following subject progression maps that fully cover the National Curriculum and beyond.  
• Our subject leaders then support our teachers to personalise and adapt the curriculum, ensuring that it is relevant to our children.
• We provide cutting edge, professional development for our educators. Our teachers follow a 'Sequence' to ensure that they all have common teaching approaches so that they deliver successful lessons.  These approaches include:
• the pre-teaching of key concepts and vocabulary
• regular reviews and the revisiting of prior learning
• strong teacher modelling
• carefully sequenced lessons that use ‘chunked learning’, allowing new learning to be retained
• continual checking of understanding that informs planning
• precise feedback for our children

Our curriculum planning is conducted in a coordinated, thematic and detailed approach. Please find below our Long-Term Curriculum Plans for the current academic year. 

Please find our Long-Term Plans below: