The New, Innovative Approach to the Key Stage 3 Curriculum at The Redway School
The new government guidelines for the Key Stage 3 curriculum which came into force at the beginning of September 2008, gave us the ideal opportunity to look again at what The Redway School was offering pupils in Years 7, 8 and 9 and see if we could make the curriculum even better!
The guidelines allowed schools to be more flexible and creative in the way the curriculum was delivered and also encouraged a cross-curricular, thematic approach rather than teaching individual subjects all the time. In this way, there could be a more coherent structure to pupils’ learning.
We used these guidelines to help us create a new curriculum which we felt would allow us to:
- promote personalized learning
- respond to individual needs
- be flexible
- make meaningful connections between subjects, events and activities
- emphasize skills for life, as appropriate for each student
We reorganised the school day and pupil groupings to introduce a cross-curricular, theme-based curriculum in the afternoon when pupils are put into one of four groups according to their ability and needs.
Each group has an afternoon session based upon The Arts (Music, Art, and Dance), Investigations (Science, Design Technology), Humanities (Geography, History) and Fitness every week and all of these areas are related to a particular theme each term. In the mornings, pupils remain in their tutor groups for Literacy, Numeracy, ICT, PSHE and RE.
There has recently been a review of our new curriculum by both internal and external assessors and we were very encouraged by the positive feedback. We look forward to building on the work already put in place to further develop the Key Stage 3 curriculum over the next two years.
