The scholarship curriculum

Scholarship Curriculum

We want our KS3 curriculum to promote the habits of learning which successful students will need to face the challenges ahead with increasingly complex academic qualifications and with an ever more demanding and fluent job market.

We want students to take responsibility for their learning by spending time in advance of their traditional curriculum lessons in preparing for them. This preparation  takes the form of reading, extracting information from texts and accumulating crucial and fundamental knowledge independently. We call this 'Prep.'

Prep allows the traditional curriculum lessons to begin with the assumption of a basic level of understanding thereby allowing higher challenge, a more meaningful engagement and more time for exploration and consolidation.

The scholarship curriculum relies on the following systems and mechanisms

• The Prep pack
• The prep lesson
• Whole academy mastery concepts
• Whole academy assessment
• Individual learning support and challenge
• Interventions
• The revision pack

Individual learning support and challenge is provided in prep by 

• learning support in lessons - including the prep lesson
• interventions, withdrawal and clubs (during or after the academy day)
• The Prep Principles pack which is a modified version of the 'prep pack,' designed for students who have acess difficulties
• The Prep Plus pack which contains supplementary material aimed at more able students or those who want to study areas in greater depth or with a wider perspective  

We value 'prep' so highly at the academy that we provide it traditional curriculum time in years 7 and 8.

The Prep lesson provides students with

• instruction on and time to practise learning skills such as building recall, extracting information, scanning text, inference, disquisition and writing styles.
• exposure to theories of learning such as how to create habits, Dwecks' 'growth mindset,' routes to memory and 'Vygotsky's 'zone of proximal development.'
• practical advice on organisation and
• support for students with motivation or access problems