Curriculum Information

CURRICULUM STATEMENT

Little Ilford School serves a diverse community and our curriculum enhances the life chances of all students. The curriculum is rich in powerful knowledge and language, which is taught and assessed through exceptionally well planned and sequenced lessons.

All subjects have a clear rationale for what is being taught, when it is being taught and how it will be assessed. Curriculum planning specifies when and how key concepts will be revisited and interleaved to ensure knowledge is retained over time.

Our curriculum is informed by the best cognitive science about student progress, achievement and learning. Our curriculum draws on the work of Rosenshine (Tom Sherrington), Dylan Williams, Daisy Christodoulou, Sweller and the EEF.

The 7 key principles underlying our curriculum design are:

1. A broad, balanced and rigorous curriculum that ensures challenge and support for all to fulfil their unique potential

2. A curriculum that develops a love of learning, nurtures creativity and instils independent thinking
3. A curriculum that celebrates diversity, promotes equality and has effective transition built into each key stage
4. A curriculum that reinforces prior learning and increases cognitive complexity through the effective teaching of reading, literacy, reasoning and problem solving
5. A curriculum that delivers opportunities for students to learn to be successful, to gain useful transferable skills whilst also building relevant knowledge
6. A curriculum that fosters a strength of character, and resilience that will help pupils to cope with choices and overcome the challenges they are likely to encounter in life
7. A curriculum that expands students’ horizons through a range of spiritual, moral, social and cultural opportunities to promote their sense of moral and social responsibility

Through these principles, we seek to provide a broad and balanced curriculum that meets the needs of all of our students and sets high standards. We provide targeted intervention and support for students who may not have yet secured the foundational knowledge to be successful in the next stage of their learning. Intervention alongside quality first teaching ensures our students make excellent progress.

In Years 7, 8  and 9 students follow a broad Key Stage 3 curriculum that develops their skills, knowledge and understanding in English, maths, science, history, geography, art, design and technology, MFL (Spanish/French), music, drama, ICT, RE and PE. 

Students in Year 9 choose four GCSE subjects to study in Year 10 – 11 combined with our core GCSEs of English Language and Literature; Mathematics and Science. Alongside this, students will study core PE,  and RE through the registration programme. The curriculum aims to support most students to achieve at least eight 9 – 4 grades at GCSE and we encourage students to select a range of subjects to study. The option subjects available for students in Year 10-11 are:

Effective Classroom Practice

Our curriculum is delivered through research and evidence-informed practices which are quality assured over time. These include:-

1. Positive framing to create an effective learning environment
2. Retrieval techniques to support students’ long term memory and cognitive load 
3. Checking for understanding strategies to address misconceptions and monitor learning 
4. Purposeful practice to allow students time to demonstrate their learning 
5. Adaptation to ensure all students have access to the curriculum being delivered 
6. Modelling to identify best practice and demonstrate high quality work and outcomes 
7. Feedback from teachers with actionable target to address gaps in learning 

Our approach:

Planning for the transition of our curriculum is well underway and has been carefully planned in order to ensure it is grounded in the most up to date curriculum research.

For more information; please email Ms Nash on info@littleilford.org