Curriculum And Teaching Updates For September 2024
August 2024
Dear parents and carers,
As we get closer to returning to school for the new academic year, I wanted to share with you a number of exciting curriculum and teaching changes which will be taking place at Co-op Academy Manchester.
These are the result of months of detailed planning and are focused on ensuring that all students are challenged and supported to strive towards becoming knowledge experts. These changes will be in place ready for the students when they rejoin us for the 2024-25 year.
Curriculum Intent
Our curriculum intent underpins everything that we do as an academy and clearly outlines the aspirations we have for our students. We set our expectations high and want all of our students to achieve well during their time in the academy.
Read our full curriculum intent statement
- Our curriculum ensures students acquire, retain and apply knowledge to unlock their potential as knowledge experts
- Our curriculum allows all students to develop long-lasting knowledge, promoting a love of learning and providing strong foundations for future learning in different areas, regardless of their starting points
- Our curriculum develops confident, competent readers who can access a range of written materials across different disciplines across the curriculum
- Our curriculum equips students with the vocabulary knowledge they require to access a range of subjects and contexts in order to communicate their knowledge effectively through writing and speaking
- Our curriculum develops knowledge and understanding of a range of career paths and how students can use their acquired knowledge to access these careers
- Our curriculum celebrates creativity, individuality and differences, providing students with transferable knowledge for life after school and experiences beyond their everyday lives
Curriculum Offer
In addition to more clearly defining our curriculum intent, we have also redesigned our curriculum offer and considered which subjects, knowledge and skills we feel students should be experiencing throughout Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4.
Read about the changes to our curriculum offer
- We will be dedicating more curriculum time to the Expressive Performing Arts (Drama and Music) at Key Stage 3. These are subjects which help develop important skills which can be transferred across many different contexts. This also reflects the abundance of creativity we have amongst our students and the local careers opportunities in the expressive arts
- We will also be dedicating more curriculum time to IT at Key Stage 3. This reflects the increased need for students to be computer literate and develop their IT skills ready for the future world, again reflecting the local and national careers landscape
- We continue to focus a suitable amount of our curriculum time on the core subjects of English, Maths and Science at both Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 4
- We have continued to refine our Key Stage 4 options offer and are proud of the range of academic and vocational subjects we provide
- We have ensured that we have a robust, personalised curriculum for our most vulnerable students delivered through our Bridge and Elevate provisions, where students will experience a broad, balanced and adapted curriculum to suit their needs
Teaching
Routines, consistency and predictability are integral to ensuring students are able to access the curriculum and acquire, retain and apply knowledge in order to become knowledge experts.
Our new approach to teaching will ensure students get broadly the same experience from lesson to lesson, whilst being taught by subject experts. Through a process of research and evidence informed practice we have identified 9 key teaching techniques, which all teachers will be using in all subjects. As such, students will master these techniques, allowing them to focus their attention on the knowledge being shared within the lessons and working on being able to independently apply this when needed.
Our teachers will undertake a robust professional development programme across the year so that students are getting genuine consistency and expert teaching in all lessons.
Our teaching techniques
- Do Now, Review Now
- Knowledge Expert Quizzes
- Cold Call and No Opt Out
- Live Modelling
- Live Feedback
- Assertive Monitoring
- Ready To Learn
- Reading For Meaning
- Select, Explain, Explore, Consolidate (SEEC)
We will be sharing more information about these techniques in the coming weeks.
Key Stage Three Assessment
Our Key Stage 3 assessment processes and practices are undergoing a complete overhaul, which includes how teachers dynamically assess and what we report to you as parents and carers. Assessment will no longer rely on arbitrary numbers and percentages but will focus on knowledge acquisition, retention and application and how this develops over time. Knowledge will be our progression model and this allows students to strive to become knowledge experts.
In each subject, students will be tracked throughout the year based on the key knowledge leaders feel should be acquired, retained and applied. This will allow us to see a more complete picture of their strengths and areas for development and adapt our curriculum and teaching to meet the needs of all students.
Years 7-9 students will receive a much more detailed report which you will be able to use to help support your child in making even greater progress.
Banding
To ensure lessons can be appropriately targeted and suitably challenging we will be banding students in groups with students of a similar prior ability.
Using CATs, SATs and reading age scores we can identify students who are likely to have similar levels of knowledge and also similar knowledge gaps. Grouping these students together means that teachers can plan their curriculum and lesson accordingly to both support and challenge students. We maintain the same high expectations for all students but understand that some students may need more support or a slightly different approach to achieve their potential.
Homework
Through your feedback in the last parent and carer survey, we have simplified and streamlined our approach to homework across all subjects and all year groups to make it easier for you to know what your child is expected to do at home.
In the new academic year, we’ll be asking every student, every day to complete:
- 10 minutes of independent revision using their Knowledge Expert Sheets (these will be handed out in September)
- 10 minutes of careful reading using the online ‘Sparx Reader’ platform
- 10 minutes of maths practice using the online ‘Sparx Maths’ platform
We will be launching this new approach with students in September and teaching them how to complete their daily structured revision and how to use the two platforms.
We will be calling this approach ‘10:10:10’ because we want students to spend at least ten minutes every day on the three elements.
A series of videos - aimed at parents and carers - will be released in September on our website explaining how daily independent revision should work and how the ‘Sparx’ platforms can be accessed.
GCSE Results 2024
Last week it was a privilege to celebrate results day with our class of 2024. This is the culmination of their hard work, resilience and determination throughout their time at Co-op Academy Manchester and we are sure students, family and friends will be proud of their individual achievements.
We are pleased to see that both progress and attainment measures continue to improve compared to 2023, including a greater number of students achieving a grade 5 or higher in all core subjects (English, Maths and Science). There has also been an increase in the number of students achieving the highest possible grade (grade 9) across our range of GCSE subjects, which exemplifies the high expectations we have had for our students and which they have for themselves.
We are also proud of the progress students have made in subjects which form the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), where we have, again, seen greater progress made when compared to our 2023 results.
I look forward to meeting you soon at our events. If any parents or carers wish to discuss any of our new curriculum plans in more detail, I would be delighted to meet with you - please book an appointment via reception.
Mr D Scott
Vice Principal