the cleeve curriculum
The Purpose of our Curriculum
Transforming the lives of those who have the most to gain from an exceptional education.
Our Cleeve Curriculum provides a framework for setting out the aims of our programme of exceptional education, including the knowledge and skills to be gained at each stage. It identifies the entirety of the knowledge and skills students need to acquire, across our subjects and classrooms, and throughout the multiplicity of extra-curricular, enrichment and personal development programmes.
Progress means knowing more, remembering more and being able to do more. Our curriculum sets out the substance of this deep body of progressive knowledge, that stretches and challenges our students. Our curriculum reflects our ethos and values and has been sequenced to enable progression towards agreed and ambitious end points.
Our core intention at Cleeve is to ensure that all students have access to the very best of what has been written, thought and said, enabling them to pursue any career of their choice and enjoy enriched lives.
Our core values of Aspiring, Collaborating and Transforming sit at the heart of our broad and challenging curriculum offer. These values, linked to our over-arching mission, drive our three to five year strategic plan and vision, and underpin our annual school development planning.
Closely allied to our values, the purpose and intent of our curriculum is to deliver our vision for an exceptional education and experience for all of our students. We feel strongly that our curriculum, from academic to enrichment and personal development, is a catalyst for transformation. Every student has an entitlement to an ambitious and enriched curriculum. Our curriculum will send students to the very best universities, apprenticeships, employers, and open doors to multiple career pathways, as well as informing students about being safe and responsible community focused citizens, with global outlooks.
Our Curriculum celebrates diversity and inclusivity to ensure that all students, regardless of perceived barriers, accumulate and build fundamental knowledge and skills as they progress through our school. This is their entitlement and will help to unlock doors of opportunity. Our curriculum is inclusive and knowledge-rich; one which ensures progress for all students. Students with SEND make significant progress due to a structured approach to their learning including modelling, scaffolding and metacognition, which allows them to access our curriculum’s deep body of knowledge.
All departments have developed a curriculum which is built around the ‘Big Questions’ within the subject. These are the core concepts that run through each subject area and the understanding of these are fundamental to becoming successful learners. We define learning as an alteration in long-term memory, which is a key part of our classroom implementation.
We see language acquisition as pivotal: the word-rich are empowered and progress to be successful with their learning and beyond, therefore a key focus in our curriculum is the structured development of reading, vocabulary and oracy. Language provides the framework on which information is built and developed. Knowledge begets knowledge, building on background knowledge and accumulating and connecting with further knowledge.
In our classroom delivery, we focus on providing high levels of challenge and stimulation, enabling students to progress by accumulating increasingly deeper levels of knowledge and skills. The crucial core of our pedagogical model is making knowledge ‘stick’ and placing it within long-term memory, then enabling students to retrieve that knowledge. Every lesson starts with a quiz which requires students to retrieve key knowledge, both current and
historical, enabling the teacher to gauge success of knowledge acquisition, whilst reinforcing students’ ability to retrieve and embed knowledge. Students are then issued with a key question, alongside knowledge and mastery goals, for that particular lesson. Our model enables the teacher to understand each student’s learning and to plan for the next steps of learning and teaching.
Our five colleges and year teams play a significant role in delivering our Cleeve Character curriculum, ensuring every student is ready to learn. We leave no student behind.
Please click the buttons below to view the curriculum offer for Key Stages 3-5.
Cleeve Curriculum key contact
For more information about our school curriculum, please contact Mrs Claire Sheppard (Deputy Head- Teaching, Learning and Training) at cls@cleeveschool.net
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