Curriculum Overview

Every student, irrespective of starting point or individual characteristics, will be provided full and unimpeded access to the HAB curriculum. Our staff will be given continuing professional development which empowers them to ensure this accessibility.

Every student, irrespective of their starting point, will be provided opportunity to learn rich content that allows access to excellent examination performance, facilitating broad choice when moving to the next stage in their education, training or employment. Examination results are the outcome of, not the motivation for, highly effective teaching and learning.

This page contains an overview of our curriculum across all Key Stages. Details of the curriculum for each subject, including curriculum plans, can be viewed on our Subjects pages.

For further information about the curriculum please contact Alex Hall on a.hall@harrisbermondsey.org.uk.

Deep and broad knowledge

The curriculum will intend to provide every student with deep and broad knowledge of all subjects they study so that they may work towards mastery of those subjects. There is the implicit understanding throughout the design of our curriculum that this ‘mastery’ looks different, and will be achieved differently, in each subject specialism.

The curriculum will form a well sequenced narrative that builds both substantive and disciplinary knowledge.

We actively encourage our staff to improve and refine their existing subject ‘content’ knowledge through active engagement with the latest academic thought, publications and research. We also actively encourage our staff to seek opportunities to enhance their understanding of how this content knowledge feeds into their knowledge of how to deliver it in the classroom – pedagogical content knowledge – through subject associations, for example.

All teachers will draw on the curriculum to secure their pedagogical content knowledge and all teachers will update the curriculum with improved sequencing, narratives and explanations using evidence of the impact of the curriculum.

How the curriculum is being implemented, and its subsequent impact will be monitored routinely against the intended curriculum outcomes and teachers will be provided with feedback that supports them in that implementation - improving their explanations, narratives and sequencing within and across lessons so that all students have access to and can achieve the intended curriculum outcomes.

Every teacher, irrespective of their stage, is a leader of curriculum and is afforded opportunity to enhance their practice and contribute to the curriculum development.

HAB curriculum implementation

Harris Academy Bermondsey aspires to a knowledge rich curriculum where curriculum is the mastery of a body of subject-specific knowledge defined by the subject specialists taking account of the national curriculum and the shared wisdom of subject pedagogical communities.

The big ideas and invaluable knowledge of a subject which pupils will acquire are planned skilfully by specialist subject teams. Skills are developed naturally as students gain more subject specialist knowledge. All subjects taught within the academy have an intent statement which sets out the inherent worth and purpose of the subject as well the intent behind the curriculum. This is reviewed on an annual basis and all staff within the teams contribute and understand the intent.

The curriculum is sequenced in a way which allows an overarching narrative to exist across units of work, year groups, key stages and the whole time in the academy. This enables each subject to teach hierarchical elements of the curriculum in the correct order. It also allows cumulative elements of the curriculum to be introduced in an order which is appropriate for each individual subject. Teams will review the sequencing of the curriculum on an annual basis taking into account the evidence derived from comparing actual outcomes with intended outcomes.

Units within the curriculum are planned to provide a resource to share best practice and train staff in the best practice of sequencing new learning. The unit curriculum plans will include:

• Extracts from the syllabus/National curriculum / federation curriculum documents
• New knowledge taught within that unit
• Gateway concepts the student needs to be able to access the new knowledge
• The vocabulary required within that unit, this will not all be subject specific vocabulary
• The hinterland which will utilise cognitive science to ensure staff share the best narratives and explanations that make the subject memorable and avoid cognitive overload whilst providing sufficient wider knowledge to put the new knowledge into a memorable context.

Each leader of a subject curriculum, along with their team of subject specialists, will choose the most appropriate resources for the curriculum. The curriculum will dictate the use of resources, rather than the other way around – for example, where subject leaders choose textbooks, this will follow a rigorous assessment of the textbook and making sure that the textbook matches the expectations of the curriculum. Where quality textbooks do not exist the specialist teachers will create and share appropriate resources.

How will we judge the impact of the curriculum?

Assessment of the curriculum will compare the actual outcomes of students with the intended outcomes of the curriculum. Each department plans the assessments that will be used to monitor the effectiveness of the curriculum and will use this to adjust the curriculum of future units to minimise any gaps in the narrative of the subject.

In all departments, teachers will utilise live marking, corrections in class and whole class feedback to ensure students learn more and remember more. Staff review the achievements of their classes and then plan lessons to address misconceptions or extend progress.

To ensure that students learn more and remember more of our knowledge rich curriculum, in all departments, retrieval practice will be embedded across schemes of work.  

All students will have two summative assessments point across the year which will be reported to parents.

The academy assessment policy can be downloaded on the Teaching and Learning page. For further details about assessment please contact Alex Hall on a.hall@harrisbermondsey.org.uk.