BIG IDEAS

The Coopers curriculum is inclusive and aims to ignite all students with a lifelong love of learning.

The Coopers curriculum is inclusive and aims to ignite all students with a lifelong love of learning. Our curriculum is broad, knowledge rich and engaging, underpinned by a set of relevant skills to broaden students’ horizons and ensure the holistic development of all our young people.

Our students are exposed to high level academic and social opportunities that raise their ambition and empower them for success in the real world to prepare students for their future.

Our ambitious curriculum and the personal wellbeing of every child is at the heart of what we do and extends beyond the classroom for our students.

We are committed to increasing the cultural capital of our young people within a community built on the values of Trust, Respect and Resilience, that endeavours to achieve strong outcomes for all.

Inclusive 

• Inclusion and Equity are guiding principles for all policies and practices
• Curriculum and assessment systems are designed to be effective for all learners
• High-quality support in place for all learners to access a full, broad and balanced curriculum
• Diversity is celebrated and all non-inclusive, discriminatory and inequitable practices are challenged

 Focused

• Some knowledge is of greater importance and use
• The most important knowledge for each unit has been carefully considered
• This most important content is intentionally shared repeatedly with pupils
• Assessments are created to track students’ progress through this powerful knowledge
• Responsive teaching results in teachers identifying and repairing gaps in this powerful knowledge

Sequenced

• Curriculum content is mapped to ensure that pupils meet new content when they are ready for it
• Curriculum plans ensure that linked content is revisited at regular intervals
• This provides opportunities to check prior learning
• Students remember more content because of this spaced practice

Coherent

• Big Ideas are used to create threads throughout the curriculum (schema)
• Big Ideas organise knowledge in the minds of students
• New information is connected to prior learning more easily
• Pupils can better understand why they are learning new content

At Coopers we promise to

• Embed a knowledge rich sequential curriculum in all subjects.
• Identify the most powerful knowledge to teach through big ideas subject knowledge organisers to scaffold and support your child’s learning journey.
• Embed teaching and learning strategies that ensure that effective learner habits are established that lead to strong outcomes for every student.
• Offer high quality SEND provision to ensure strong outcomes for our students.
• Increase the opportunities for literacy across the disciplines, for every child to develop a love of reading.
• Ensure that all students are exposed to CEIAG and Higher Education opportunities in each year group.
• Deliver high quality PHSE provision to enable students to make the right personal choices at all stages of life including Relationship and Sex Education.
• Raise cultural capital across the disciplines including British Values and Spiritual, Moral, Social, Cultural development.
• Offer a wide range of extracurricular activities to allow our students to excel in both academia and within their own specialist areas outside of the normal classroom.

Our curriculums, develop and refine learners’ prior conceptions as opposed to teaching something entirely new. Approaches that compare, organise, and map concepts try to make schemas clear and visible and are thought to support learners to organise and extend their ideas. The flexible nature of schemas does mean that specific teaching and learning strategies foster a more desirable order to a learner’s pre-existing and developing knowledge.

Our approach to working with schemas focuses on pupils organising and elaborating on their ideas to develop more complex mental structures.  We do this through the development of our subject specific Big Ideas that run through the 5 year curriculum.  The relevant Big Idea is referenced at the start of each lesson through the curriculum slide, to orientate the learners within the curriculum.

In all of our 5 year curriculum plans you can see the Big Ideas outlined, mapped and developed over time.

Please click each topic within in the subjects to access Subject Knowledge Organisers.