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Ridgewood School

Ridgewood School

Curriculum

Curriculum Intent

At Ridgewood School our values of Respect, Responsibility and Resilience are central to everything we do, including our curriculum. We set high expectations to ensure that our students achieve well. We believe in the power that our broad and ambitious curriculum holds in raising the aspirations of our students. Our curriculum aims to prepare students for the road ahead, ensuring they leave us with the knowledge and skills they will need in order to take advantage of opportunities, responsibilities and experiences in later life.

At Ridgewood School, students will:

Experience a broad and ambitious curriculum
Build their knowledge and apply it as skills to make excellent progress
Be literate and numerate
Develop personally, socially, culturally, morally, mentally and physically
Develop as British citizens
Secure readiness for future progression

Curriculum Implementation

At Ridgewood School students will know more, remember more and be able to do more in each subject to demonstrate excellent progress. The curriculum is designed and sequenced to build on prior learning and secure readiness for subsequent learning.  Our curriculum is planned to embrace concepts from cognitive science about cognitive load, memory, forgetting and the power of retrieval practice. These concepts are used to support our students in building schema and altering their long-term memory through learning.

Ridgewood School’s teaching and learning philosophy, known as ‘The Ridgewood Way’, supports teachers to deliver the curriculum through highly effective pedagogical principles, backed by research and evidence.

At Ridgewood School, students will experience lessons that are:

  • Designed and taught by teachers who have excellent knowledge of their subjects’ theoretical knowledge, skills and pedagogical approaches.
  • Aspirational and challenging. Teachers won’t lower their expectations of any student but will support them to build, retain and retrieve powerful, transformative knowledge and skills. Teachers will model excellence to the students in a variety of ways to accelerate their progress.
  • Adapted to meet everyone’s needs. Teachers will support and challenge all students carefully to enable them to meet highly challenging learning objectives, regardless of their starting points.
  • Structured on a strong foundation of routines and high expectations. Teachers will maintain high expectations of students’ behaviour, attitude to learning and task completion. They will encourage students to have high expectations for themselves.
  • Carefully and logically sequenced towards purposeful assessments. Teachers use lessons to build cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills, towards agreed end points.
  • Designed to promote high expectations of literacy through reading, writing and oracy. Teachers will reinforce the correct use of English across the curriculum.
  • Reflective of the importance of our school community and our core values of Respect, Responsibility and Resilience.

Curriculum Impact

A curriculum is a ‘live’ process. At Ridgewood School, we review our curriculum regularly to ensure it delivers our curriculum intent, and that it continues to meet the needs of each individual student.

  • Curriculum intent and implementation is reviewed and quality assured through line management and a range of associated processes.
  • Faculty/subject leaders review their curriculum annually to ensure the sequence of delivery is appropriate to allow all students to build on prior learning, and secure readiness for subsequent learning.
  • Curriculum hours and subjects offered are reviewed annually by the Senior Leadership Team and Governors to ensure we continue to offer a broad and ambitious curriculum for students.
  • Students and their parents/carers have opportunities to review the curriculum intent and implementation at various points throughout the school year, including at Parents’ evenings and during each Creating Futures cycle.

This section of our website will give you access to information about what students learn at Ridgewood, you can find detailed information about each subject by clicking on Curriculum Subjects.

Please click here to download our overall curriculum map for KS3-5. This shows the overall scope and sequence of the curriculum in each subject area from Y7-13. If you would like to read about each topic in more detail, please click on the 'Learning Maps' page which shows more detailed curricular planning.

If you have any queries about our curriculum, please contact Andy Bridge, Headteacher.
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