Curriculum Intent

AIREDALE ACADEMY’S

CURRICULUM INTENT STATEMENT 

As a member of Northern Ambition Academies Trust, we ensure that our curriculum is ambitious, enriched, broad and engaging and that it incorporates the Trust’s values of Ambition, Bravery and Respect. 

Airedale Academy’s curriculum: 

• provides challenging learning opportunities for all students  
• is sequenced effectively, to enable students to build their knowledge and skills over time 
• embeds knowledge and skills by promoting strategies, including: retrieval practice; interleaving and dual-coding to ensure that new knowledge and skills embed in long-term memory 
• provides effective formative assessment opportunities to check that knowledge and skills are embedded and mastered, prior to exposing students to new content and skills 
• promotes whole class feedback and DIRT time, in order to address individual and whole-class misconceptions  
• exposes students to an enriched Tier 2 and Tier 3 vocabulary and provides opportunities to embed and apply new vocabulary through the Vocabulary Vault in a sequence of lessons 
• provides opportunities to develop levels of literacy and numeracy required to access all areas of the curriculum 
• promotes a culture of reading and exposes students to a range of culturally enriching texts through DEAR time and form-time reading of ambitious and diverse texts 
• promotes opportunities across the curriculum for the development of good student health and well being 
• recognises the importance of digital literacy and provides opportunities for the development of the IT skills required for life 
• equips students with the skills they need to function safely and responsibly in an increasingly technological world 
• provides a range of academic, technical and vocational courses which challenge, engage and motivate pupils 
• develops cultural capital and creativity across a wide range of contexts and experiences 
• ensures that all students make good progress irrespective of their starting point  
• provides enrichment opportunities and the opportunities to work with outside organisations, where external expertise will enhance the quality of education on offer  
• ensures that statutory guidance is met, including opportunities to explore future careers opportunities 

Key Stage 3 Documents

• Key Stage 3 Assessment Overview
• Curriculum Breadth
• KS3 Key Assessment Piece Mapping Document

The Key Stage 3 provision at Airedale Academy provides a well-planned, well-sequenced and ambitious curriculum. All KS3 subject areas have identified the core knowledge, concepts and skills that students will need to know. KS3 lessons are purposefully sequenced, in order to ensure that knowledge is able to be stored in the students' long term memory. 

We understand the vital role that assessment plays in providing a high-quality education and have fully integrated formative assessment into our approach to teaching and learning. The academy uses a variety of formative and summative assessment strategies to check that students know more, remember and can do more.  Key Assessment Pieces are used as one element of our formative assessment, which is on-going assessment of small chunks of learning to discover what students know and understand in order to further inform future teaching and learning. Students will also undertake summative assessment tasks at spaced intervals across the Key Stage, in order to develop a holistic picture of knowledge and understanding from recent exposure to the curriculum being taught, as well as to assess how well previous knowledge has embedded.