Our Curriculum
At Bishop Justus Church of England School, we are committed to ensuring every child and young person achieves our motto: success through faith, love and learning. We believe in offering every child and young person, regardless of their starting point or background, an exciting, broad and balanced curriculum where all subjects are valued equally. We believe in the power of knowledge and the importance of nurturing creativity, critical thinking and children’s talents and interests to enable all children and young people to flourish, make positive contributions to their communities and to ‘live life to the full’ (John 10:10).
How do we achieve this?
We believe that each distinct subject discipline is important. We make sure that children learn core knowledge established within each discipline and the ways in which experts work and seek truth in each field. By doing this, we aim to help them understand how we make meaning in the world, access further study, explore careers and join in scholarly discussion and debate from a position of knowledge.
Every aspect of school life is carefully planned to help us achieve the AQUINAS vision of “life transforming learning”. We help children and young people to become well-rounded individuals by carefully weaving our virtues of love, kindness, faith, hope, courage and wisdom through all that we do. Our high expectations for behaviour, our commitment to equality in curriculum and relationships, our offer of a broad and exciting enrichment offer and our pastoral support, ensures all children and young people feel they are valued and belong. In this way, we aim to teach students to be compassionate, kind and courageous advocates who feel they have a place in the world and able to make a positive contribution to it.
How is it reflected in our planning?
We are committed to ensuring all children and young people have the cultural capital they need to succeed. Our curriculum is knowledge-rich, and recognises the important role language plays for children and young-people to access and engage with all subjects, communicate effectively, think deeply and express themselves clearly. The teaching of tier 2 and tier 3 vocabulary is a key part of our curriculum. We see the importance of helping children and young people develop a passion for reading and so share and promote high quality texts. Access to sport, music, theatre, the British countryside and coast, art galleries, historic sites and to higher education providers broadens the horizons of our children and young people and helps them access the shared cultural reference points that are part of 21st century life.
How is learning secured?
We enable children and young people to know more, remember more and do more over time. We help children to embed deep knowledge in their long-term memories so that working memory can be focused on learning new content, being creative and problem solving. To do this, we use learning from the world of cognitive science to thoughtfully sequence and revisit knowledge, identify component knowledge, and empower students with a range of experiences as well as knowledge and skills.
What does success look like?
Our curriculum is ambitious, and it is for everyone. We want every student to be successful and prepared for the next stage of their education or the world of work. Therefore, we have high expectations of our pedagogy so all students learn the intended curriculum. Learning is modelled and scaffolded and teaching adapted to enable all children and young people to access the curriculum and achieve the same high standards. Formative and summative assessments are used to address misconceptions, further adapt teaching and inform curriculum review.
Who do our students become?
We believe in helping students to become effective independent learners. By developing their metacognition and self-regulation skills, students can plan their learning, monitor their progress, evaluate their outcomes and apply that knowledge in the future. Equality, diversity and inclusion is threaded throughout our work, narratives and the curriculum to ensure we not only provide an academically enhancing offer but also one that reflects the community we serve. Our GCSE and Post 16 pathways are tailored to suit the needs of each cohort and we routinely seek new options to offer our students, based on their interests.
We do all this because curriculum matters to us and to our students. We want to give them a ‘way in’ to all disciplines, to equip them with cultural capital, to give them a body of deep knowledge that they remember, to expose them to the best that has been thought and said and to empower them to play a meaningful role in the world as they grow into adulthood.