Curriculum Intent

Through explicit teaching of knowledge and skills, we intend for our curriculum to help pupils become successful independent learners, who have cultural awareness and a strong sense of the world around them. 

• Our curriculum is taught with the intention of moving learning to the long-term memory. 
• Our aims are to ensure that all pupils experience a rich and broad curriculum that equips them for success now and in the future. Pupils are exposed to a wide variety of subject areas and arts; promoting character-building qualities that lead to creating well-rounded, global citizens which will enable them to interact with others leading to meaningful qualifications that will open up doors to paths in later life.

We use the following curriculum drivers to create our broad and sequenced curriculum which is planned for progression. These consider our pupils' community and backgrounds; our school values and our understanding of a high-quality education. Our curriculum drivers enable all pupils to see themselves reflected in our curriculum.

At Dukesgate Academy, we aim to ensure that learning is securely embedded in the long-term memory. To achieve this, we plan and teach our curriculum using Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction as well as interleaving and spacing, and blocked practice:

• Review for remembering - the struggle to retrieve is beneficial for building fluency and confidence, therefore we interleave and space previous learning and vertical concepts on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to ensure that it is embedded. 
• Questioning - asking more questions in more depth encourages our pupils to understand at a deeper level. 
• Sequencing concepts and modelling - to ensure mastery, we use blocked practice to teach some subjects and topics thoroughly before moving to another. We ensure that each concept and element of the curriculum model is well sequenced and planned for progression and depth. 
• Stages of practice - the use of Kagan structures during guided practice promotes co-operative learning and communication which boosts pupil confidence and engagement. Independent practice leads to overlearning which is essential for new learning to be recalled quickly. This also ensures that no overload on the working memory. 

If pupils are keeping up with our well planned and sequenced curriculum, they are deemed to be making progress. We measure the impact our curriculum is making through the following:

• Post learning quizzies - low stakes quizzes taken at the end of a unit of work and often repeated as part of review and retrieval ensures understanding of vertical concepts and crucial learning is stored in the long-term memory. 
• Formative assessment - evaluating whether practice is appropriate and related to our goals. 
• Termly tracking - tracking of standards and standardised testing in Reading, Writing and Maths. 
• Pupil voice, lesson drop-in's, book looks and monitor learning environments are used to ensure high standards and progress is maintained in each subject.