Curriculum

Our curriculum statement

As a multi-academy trust, Aspire wants to ensure that all our students receive a high quality education, centred around a high quality, aspirational curriculum offer that meets their needs. This curriculum statement makes clear the common elements of the curriculum intent in all Aspire schools and services and clarifies where those schools and services can and ought to develop different curricula in order to meet the needs of their different cohorts of student.

Our Vision

All Aspire Schools aim to ensure that our curriculum ensures students are safe, loved, and learning, and that they are working towards a transition into a positive destination.

Aspires vision is to support young people, whatever their background and circumstances, to: Build strong foundations, and open new doors. We are led in everything we do by two ‘red thread’ questions: “what is best for the child?” and “how can we make that happen?”

And we encourage staff to always reflect on these questions, and to always ask themselves: “how would I feel if this was my child?”

Curriculum entitlement

The curriculum in all Aspire Schools or services will be different, designed to meet the needs of the different cohorts we cater for. However, they will all be designed to ensure that children are safe, loved and learning, and that they are working towards transitioning into a positive destination that is appropriate for them.

Intent

All Aspire schools and services will have a clear overarching intent for their curriculum, as well as clear intents for each subject area within that curriculum. We understand the intent of the whole curriculum to include:

• The need to prioritise work around pupils’ personal development and reading. We view this is as reading being a gateway to accessing the whole curriculum.
• Strategies for pupils to find their voice in positive ways, understand their past and develop strategies for a positive future.
• The knowledge and skills that pupils in a particular school, service, or subject need
• The end points that the curriculum is building towards, and what pupils need to know and be able to do to reach those end points.
• Clear sequencing of content where knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before enabling students to know more and be able to do more.
• Clarity around how the curriculum identifies and addresses gaps in knowledge and skills.
• High aspiration for all our pupils that develops a culture of high challenge.
• A varied curriculum offer ensuring we create equity across the MAT.

As a provider of secondary Alternative Provision, most of our schools and services do not educate children from the start of year 7 to the end of year 11 or 13. This means that our curriculum must be adaptive to meet the changing needs of our young people.

Implementation

The implementation of the curriculum will look different in our different schools and services. The common themes that will feature in the implementation across Aspire include:

• Teachers with appropriate subject knowledge and subject knowledge support networks.
• High quality teaching and learning, including teachers who present information clearly, check pupils’ understanding, ensuring that students embed concepts in their long-term memory and give high-quality feedback that enables students to make progress.
• Adaptive approaches that ensure all pupils thrive, both with us and when they leave us.

Impact

Schools and services will adopt a wide range of measures to help them evaluate the impact of their curriculum. They will make these clear in their curriculum documentation. Impact measures that all Aspire schools and services will use include:

• Attendance
• Progress in SEMH
• Progress in reading ages
• Academic progress
• Progress made against curriculum related expectations (CREs)
• Outcomes for leavers (e.g. year 11 outcomes).

Please click here to see our curriculum offer.