Curriculum Intent

WAT Moral Purpose

‘To unlock the academic and personal potential of all our learners’

Our Curriculum Intent

At Windsor Academy Trust our curriculum exists to ensure all students regardless of background and ability have the opportunity to ‘unlock their academic and personal potential’. We are committed to students being challenged from their previous key stage learning experiences. Our curriculum will provide the platform in preparing students with the foundations for examination success.

Our curriculum Intent has been informed by a wide variety of researchers and thought leaders. Christine Counsell summarises the aspiration of our curriculum to empower all learners creating a pathway to success in university, their career and life:

‘A curriculum exists to change the pupil, to give the pupil new power. One acid test for a curriculum is whether it enables even lower attaining or disadvantaged pupils to clamber in to the discourse and practices of educated people, so that they gain powers of the powerful.’

Our WAT Curriculum Framework

Builds on KS2 Primary curriculum. The KS3 curriculum provides the foundations for academic success in examinations. The curriculum framework consists of the following:

Threshold concepts	Threshold concepts define potentially powerful transformative points in the student’s learning experience. They are the ‘jewels in the curriculum’ because they identify key areas that need mastery. Until students ‘get them’, they can struggle to understand a subject.
Mastery/ Deep Learning	The route to deep learning and the development of expertise and mastery is to do fewer things in greater depth. Threshold Concepts are mastered through repeated sequencing, that allows the student to apply Threshold Concepts into different contexts.
Long term Memory – sequencing – story telling	Long term memory is the foundation for incorporating and making sense of new knowledge. Material sits in the long term memory when it has been ‘chunked’ into meaningful schemata, stories or concepts. Sequencing Threshold Concepts over the journey of the curriculum helps students to make progress and allows them to apply the Threshold Concepts into different contexts within and across subjects.
Challenge	The provision of difficult work that causes students to think deeply and engage in healthy struggle – a high challenge, low risk culture is created.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary	To have access to and master deep subject knowledge, students need to be exposed to the cultural capital of language. Tier 2 are general academic words which occur across different subjects, and are essential for reading comprehension. Tier 3 are subject specific words. The richness of vocabulary allows students to enter the academic discipline and address social mobility.
Character	The Windsor Academy Trust ASPIRE character framework identifies fourteen character virtues that are explicitly taught through the curriculum

360 Cycle

All students across all key stages, should be able to maximise their learning by having the opportunity to revisit learning and correct their misunderstandings. The curriculum is therefore organised into three cycles of learning, each cycle lasting 12-13 weeks in total, within each cycle there are three distinct phases.

Phase One (approx. 1-9 weeks)		Phase Two (approx. 1 week)		Phase Three (approx. 2 weeks)
Teach – Embed – Assess	>	Performance stock take	>	Review and re-do

Implementation

Our curriculum intent will be implemented through ‘engaging, enthusing and inspiring every lesson, every day.’ Our WAT teaching and learning cycle, through which our ten teaching and learning principles are embedded, ensures that the curriculum is delivered effectively so that all students make progress regardless of background and ability.

ATTENDANCE

BEHAVIOUR

SAFEGUARDING

ATTENDANCE

BEHAVIOUR

SAFEGUARDING