Curriculum Overview

Our core purpose is to provide a first-class education. Every child (regardless of starting point, disadvantage or SEND need) has the right to acquire knowledge and skills in every subject before they leave Ormiston SWB Academy.

We want to create consistency and alignment across the Academy so that every classroom can share in our collective knowledge of what makes for the best curriculum, the best teaching and valuable assessment.

Ormiston SWB Academy students are expected to demonstrate a vast array of characteristics that will prepare them for future success. Our core values clearly signal to staff, students and parents the importance of  Character, Organisation, Resilience and Excellence which ensure our Academy is a focused, happy and a safe place to learn and achieve. Our values are supported by our C.O.R.E Futures Programme. This is aimed at giving students the opportunity to have experiences, which deepen knowledge, embed skills and strengthen character. Through Years 7 to 13, students will study and take part in an enrichment programme including visits, courses, events and activities alongside their timetabled lessons.

At KS3 our curriculums are designed to expose and immerse pupils in topics and concepts in different disciplines across the Academy.  Subjects are ‘conscious’ of each other and staff work in collaboration to adapt their well sequenced curriculums to link connections with other subject curriculums.  By making our KS3 curriculums conscious, learners are given opportunities to make connections of similar concepts across different subjects.  These curriculum connections are connected through similar concepts or topics in order to help our pupils to see how different areas of knowledge complement each other to broaden their own learning experiences. 

We want our pupils to be ‘conscious’ of these connections within their different subjects to stimulate better retention of knowledge, develop schema and to place a greater value on what they are learning. This is to allow learners to be challenged across the Academy, and to develop independence and wider schema transferring knowledge and skills over a number of subjects.  This is to be achieved through subjects developing a consistent approach to cross-over subject pedagogy ensuring that teachers of the same topic within different subject areas deliver the same technique and language to re-enforce knowledge and skills.