Our Approach

Vision and Intent

At Queen’s Park Academy our goal is to ensure every pupil benefits from a broad, ambitious, knowledge-rich curriculum taught by highly skilled teachers.  Our well-designed and well-sequenced curriculum sets pupils on the pathway to becoming highly educated adults so that they can become active participants of society, living happy and fulfilling lives.

Our curriculum maps the knowledge our students require to make progress in each subject discipline. Our pupils learn to view the world from different perspectives and respectfully challenge varying interpretations. By grounding new information in a well-developed web of prior learning, we enable all pupils, whatever their starting point, to achieve academic success.

Implementation and enactment

We believe transformative outcomes can be achieved through a combination of excellent curriculum planning and high-quality teacher instruction.  We ensure our curriculum is taught to be remembered by ensuring our approach is research-informed. Teachers break learning down to guide pupils towards clearly defined curricular goals, revisit and build on prior learning regularly, and check pupil understanding carefully.

Preparation is key to effective delivery of the curriculum. Our teachers think carefully about the most effective way to communicate the planned knowledge, consider which areas will need particular focus or emphasis, and identify areas where pupils may struggle or could benefit from greater challenge.  This important work is led by Subject leaders who ensure teachers are well supported by subject specific professional development, co-planning opportunities and regular feedback.    

All students are entitled to the same rigorous academic curriculum irrespective of their starting point. Students are taught in mixed ability teaching groups throughout the school. Some students have small-group or one to one phonics teaching to support their knowledge in reading.

Our school routines support strong implementation of the curriculum. Calm and orderly transitions, clear classroom entry and exit routines, and common expectations across classrooms maximise efficiency and enable all pupils to learn.  Our lessons contain a balance of review of prior learning, clear and concise teacher instruction and modelling, independent practice and self-marking, all of which are used to support pupils to understand and remember new knowledge.

Impact and assessment

We use assessment to ensure our pupils have learned the curriculum.  In all lessons teachers will routinely check for understanding, and during independent practice teachers will monitor pupils’ work to ensure errors or misconceptions are addressed at the earliest opportunity.

Assessments will take place at the end of each unit to assess how successfully pupils have remembered the content recently taught.  Cumulative assessments take place at the end of the year, assessing carefully selected content drawn from throughout the relevant key stage.  Teachers use these assessments to plan their next steps in teaching so that they can close any knowledge gaps that persist.

Subject and key stage

Our curriculum is divided into subjects, recognising the identity of the disciplines we study, fostering a love for subject content that will flourish as children move through the curriculum. Our curriculum nurtures the minds of children who will think often and deeply. Pupils will be taught meaningful content that builds on their prior knowledge. Drawing on research-based cognitive science, there are carefully planned opportunities to recall and revisit vital prior knowledge and to strengthen retrieval from lesson to lesson, unit to unit and year to year. The knowledge base encourages children to infer, question, interpret, analyse, argue and reason. Most importantly, our curriculum provides children with the tools they need to participate in their own education that will continue for a lifetime.

Our curriculum is tailored to meet the needs of our pupils, it is accessible for all pupils in line with the Equality Act 2010 and Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014.

In addition to teaching beyond the requirements of the National Curriculum Programmes of study we are dedicated to widening the experiences of the children and ensure learning is enriched by trips out and visitors into school.

Click here to view our whole school Curriculum Map

Click here to view our Writing and Reading Curriculum

Should you wish to find out more about the curriculum taught at QPA please get in touch with the School office on 01234 352901 and a member of the admin team will ensure you are directed to the appropriate person.