Our ambitious curriculum is designed to be adapted to meet the needs of every individual child. We aim to support the students to respond, explore and understand the world in which they live, focusing on themselves, their local community and further afield.
When students leave us we want them to:
- Be independent
- Know themselves and the world around them
- Have respect for others
- Be kind
- Show resilience
- Be able to communicate with others
- Be functional learners
Curriculum intent
Our ambitious curriculum is designed to be adapted to meet the needs of every individual child. We aim to support the students to respond, explore and understand the world in which they live, focusing on themselves, their local community and further afield.
We do this through repetition, revisiting and re-calling regularly so that students can deeply embed and remember core knowledge. The spiral curriculum builds on complexity and challenge for each pathway, year on year. Our curriculum is sequenced to build complex knowledge and skills over time. We currently offer two curriculum pathways.
Reading is prioritised in our curriculum and is taught via two strands, word recognition and language comprehension. Our intention is to implement the following strands, both explicitly through rigorous systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) and comprehension intervention, and discreetly through the incorporation of reading strategies throughout the curriculum:
- Phonics
- Comprehension
- Independent reading
- Reading Aloud/ oracy
- Cross-curricular reading
- Reading for pleasure
Outdoor education is important to us. Evidence suggests that students who are able to learn outdoors are happier, healthier and behave more successfully (Natural Connections project 2016) so all students in KS3 attend outdoor education sessions based offsite, they also have forest school as part of their timetabled curriculum offer. At KS4, students have the option of completing the Duke of Edinburgh award.
Feeling part of, and understanding their local community, is important in preparing the students for life after Crosshill, so staff work hard to provide trips and visits each half term, that directly link with curriculum topics.
Woven through our curriculum are opportunities for our students to work towards developing independence and achieve the outcomes set out in the EHCplan. We provide our students with the foundations they need to grow up and become adults who can thrive.
Our school values
These are at the heart of everything we do as a school and our curriculum is no exception to this.
We want our students to be excited by what they are learning and be able to ask questions and be interested in learning new ideas.
We understand that to be ready to learn students need to feel safe and happy and be able to communicate their feelings to others. Our students are mainly taught within class groups an this allows them to build strong relationships and feel secure in their environment. Our PHSE, Citizenship and Skills Builder curriculum explicitly supports students to develop their mental and physical wellbeing.
Word recognition and language comprehension are embedded into all our subjects and staff are expected to utilise keyword walls, word mats and specialist technology, such as Clicker, to support students to develop functional literacy. We also want our children to be able to communicate with others successfully and our curriculum allows students to develop important communication skills.
