To provide a rich, broad knowledge and skills- based curriculum including fulfilling our enrichment guarantee.  Strategic Objective 1.1 

 Our overall curriculum design is underpinned by our vision for what the pupils in our communities need to thrive and become confident learners. Our Curriculum offer identifies the Knowledge, Skills, Attributes and Experiences we seek to develop in our pupils (KASE).  We see each component of KASE as an entitlement for pupils and KASE shapes the whole experience within a school.  Our Subject Curriculum design is driven by developing expert subject knowledge alongside skills to support thoughtful critical thinkers who can communicate ideas and thoughts with clarity.  Key to our curriculum vision is that pupils experience a wide range of cultural opportunities and materials and are encouraged to communicate and talk about their knowledge, thinking and learning.

Knowledge: our first driver for our subject planning is to develop expertise by ensuring that pupils master, over time, the key substantive and conceptual knowledge within each subject discipline. Developing subject expertise and fluency in the disciplines (thinking and talking like an historian, a geographer , a mathematician etc) drives the subject curriculum work across all phases.

We want pupils to know, understand and remember more but we also want pupils to explore knowledge and be critical thinkers. We believe that, for our pupils, we need to design learning opportunities to promote key attributes which are associated with developing an appetite and a thirst for learning.  For pupils to be supported to be risk-tolerant, learn resilience, be reflective and empathetic through how we design our learning opportunities within schools.

For the same reason, we design learning sequences to develop skills which are characteristics of effective learning and which we believe have transferable qualities. The key underpinning skill is communication and the importance of oracy in exploratory talk, reasoning to deepen thinking and in vocabulary development. These characteristics of effective learning are drivers of pedagogical design (collaboration, problem-solving, communication including oracy and meta-cognition).

Experiences of activities, visits to places and encounters with people or background context provide stimulus for and models of how knowledge is gained.  The design and planning of our curriculum makes explicit the weaving in of authentic experiences and wide range of rich ‘texts’ which give pupils the opportunities to see where knowledge and learning could take them and enables connections and links to be made.

All schools in our trust aim to fulfil delivery of our enrichment guarantee for all pupils. Uptake is tracked to support this aim. Our schools offer an extensive range of enrichment activities to enhance learning in each school, and across our schools. We aim for immersive external experiences and excellence in our enrichment programmes. This entitlement includes:

• Opportunities to access and participate in visits to theatres, galleries and cultural events;
• Work directly with arts practitioners and designers, sporting experts and the like;
• Aim to ensure entitlement of offer to experience a residential stay;
• Participate in projects for the local and wider community;
• Have access to a variety of careers talks, workplace and university visits, and work experience.