Curriculum

Our school curriculum is rooted in our school Mission Statement 'May God's Love Be Our Guide', which outlines the faith and values that drive the work of our school. There are some shared beliefs taken from our Mission:

• The curriculum should promote the spiritual and the academic equally
• The importance of aspiration and high expectations for all learners
• Aspiration must lead to a strong ethos of social mobility
• Achievement and success is for everybody in our school

The curriculum has been designed to inspire and challenge all learners and prepare them for adult life. The school aims to develop a broad and balanced curriculum that helps all our pupils to become successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens.

Specifically, we want our curriculum to ensure our pupils:

1. Achieve strong outcomes to provide opportunities to progress in life 
2. Enjoy and engage in their learning
3. Showcase and develop their talents & employability skills 
4. Help pupils develop lively, enquiring minds, an ability to question and debate rationally and apply themselves to challenges 
5. Develop values and respect for different views, beliefs and ways of life 
6. To become global citizens

The word curriculum derives from the Latin “currere” meaning a course on which a race is run.  This implies a sense of movement, a journey structured over time.  Our curriculum – the journey – is designed to ensure students are equipped with the knowledge and skills they need to develop their God-given talents as successful learners, confident individuals, and responsible citizens ready for the wider world.

Our curriculum is designed to be remembered; to be stored in students’ long-term memory.  Knowledge is sequenced and mapped deliberately and coherently considering the end points of Key Stage 2 through to Key Stage 5 so that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before and towards defined end points. 

Martin Robinson states that curriculum “has to be joined up with the teacher knowing how what they are teaching fits into the overall narrative,” a real sense of what the journey will result in, and this concept of the curriculum as a journey formed the start of our journey in developing our curriculum at Blessed Thomas Holford.

Each of our curriculum leads have thought deeply about the design and sequence of their curriculum to ensure students know more, remember more and experience more through an inspiring and knowledge-rich curriculum offer.  Curriculum leads have planned their curriculum based on what we teach and why – not just what the National Curriculum and exam specifications dictate, but what a pupil and student from Blessed Thomas Holford needs to know and do to be successful and to flourish on their journey from Year 7 to Year 13 and beyond.