Shoreham Academy Curriculum

At Shoreham Academy we strive to ensure that our young people experience an excellent education. Our curriculum has been designed in a way that brings out the best in every young person, maximises their cognitive development while nurturing their talents, and prepares them for success in life. Our curriculum empowers young people with powerful knowledge, which helps them to build confidence enabling them to understand and shape the world around them.

At Shoreham Academy

• Our core values of hard work, integrity, and excellence are at the heart of everything we do. We set high expectations to ensure that every student excels across all aspects of academy life.
• Our intention is to ensure that all students are supported and challenged to make outstanding progress, and that the curriculum removes any potential barriers to learning.
• We want our students to leave with skills and experiences which develop character and prepare them exceptionally well for life beyond the academy.

At Shoreham Academy our curriculum is cohesive, cumulative, and highly sequenced to secure students’ understanding of how the small details form a part of the bigger picture and how it’s relevant. This approach also helps students make links between their subjects, such as the crossover between history and literature, for example. This provides students a foundation on which to build further study and skill development across all their subjects. Our curriculum is progressive in quality and quantity across the years and key stages and mapped in detail and this ensures consistency and a shared understanding of high learning expectations. Our curriculum is designed with content and skill development underpinned by age-related key performance indicators (KPIs) at Key Stage 3, and we aim to not only meet the requirements of the exam based Key Stage 4 and Key Stage 5 curriculum but go beyond the core expectations ensuring that students are well prepared for their next steps.

Our curriculum is challenging, and we have high expectations for what all students can achieve when they are provided with the right support and guidance. It is broken down into learning cycles over each academic year which allows for deep and extended exploration of topics and this approach enables students to master the knowledge, skills and understanding in detail. Our teachers use the Rosenshine Principles to deliver high quality lessons which are designed with long-term memory in mind, and we ensure that students’ knowledge, skills and understanding are cemented by frequent and systematic revisiting. Our approach to teaching and learning supports our curriculum by ensuring that lessons build on prior learning and provide sufficient opportunity for guided and independent practice. At the heart of Rosenshine's Principles is a simple instructional core:

• Demonstration (explanation and modelling) of new material in small steps (I)
• Guided practice with prompts and scaffolds (we)
• Independent practice with monitoring and feedback from teacher (you)

Education with Character

Our curriculum is all encompassing and resonates far beyond the classroom. Alongside our taught subject timetable, we have an in-depth programme which supports students’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development. Our pastoral and extra-curricular programme aims to develop independent and confident individuals through a range of additional experiences such as inspirational speakers, educational trips, careers advice as well as a host of opportunities to engage in sports, culture and the arts. Every year in July we have an experience week which is intended to spark curiosity and to nourish both head and heart.

If you would like any further information on our curriculum, please email info@shoreham-academy.org  

Assessment

At Shoreham Academy formative assessment is embedded within our lessons to support students to learn effectively and ensure our teachers adapt and modify their planning and teaching. Lessons begin with a ‘Do Now’ which we use to support students embed knowledge into their long-term memory, recall this and apply to different contexts. These tasks also allow the teacher a chance to review the prior knowledge needed before new content is taught and identify any misconceptions that might need addressing.

Once new knowledge and skills have been taught our teachers skilfully question students to ensure they have a common understanding before moving on to the practice phase on the lesson. Through answering the teacher’s questions and think-pair-share activities students also develop good oracy skills. In addition to the above teachers will use a wide range of other assessment techniques as part of their lessons to check new and prior knowledge to ensure content is secure before moving on.

Twice a year our students are tested with longer assessments that will allow them to practise connecting evidence from across a wider period. These longer assessments also help teachers and subject teams identify common areas that need re-teaching or common misconceptions that need addressing before moving on. The summative assessment also helps us identify where a student might have fallen behind with the learning so we can plan to support them in catching up.