Curriculum Overview
Our Core Goal: Re-engaging Your Child (Intent)
At Highfields College, we believe that student engagement is the key to educational and life success. Students who are hopeful and motivated achieve better results. We use the Geddes Learning Triangle to break engagement down into three important phases:
- Emotional and Behavioural Engagement: This is the first phase. Your child will build strong, trusting relationships with our staff and peers through shared positive experiences, leading to a more settled and productive time at the college.
- Subject Engagement: This is the second phase. We help students find and pursue subjects they genuinely care about—the ‘hooks’. Success in these areas then acts as a powerful motivator to engage with and excel in core subjects like English, Maths, and Science, which are vital for their next steps.
- Cognitive Engagement: This is the third phase. We encourage your child to move past simply memorizing facts. We want them to become independent thinkers, asking their own questions and exploring topics out of genuine curiosity.
What and How Your Child Will Learn (Implementation)
Our timetable is carefully balanced to ensure your child leaves with the skills needed to return to mainstream school or for their post-16 pathway:
- Building Foundations: Over half of their learning time is dedicated to English, Maths, and Science. We prioritize assessing and tracking progress in literacy and numeracy for all students upon entry and throughout the year.
- Diverse Study Opportunities: We complement core subjects with a range of creative, technical, and vocational courses to cater to different interests and learning styles. This approach is particularly important as many of our Year 11 students prefer work-based learning after leaving us.
- Character Development: Every subject has a dual purpose: to teach academic skills and to develop your child’s character. We incorporate our ‘Character 120’ initiative across all subjects to help students become trusting, engaged, and responsible members of society.
- A Supportive Environment: We actively promote positive social interaction through our Supportive Social Time approach during breaks and lunch, based on current research into student well-being.
- Offsite Support: For students who are really struggling to access the main site and its curriculum, we offer a number of alternatives. These offsite settings use specialized ‘hooks’ like art, sports, music, or outdoor learning to make the school environment accessible and appealing.
Measuring Your Child’s Success (Impact)
We measure the success of our curriculum by looking at the progress your child makes from their individual starting points, not just comparing them to others. We focus on clear improvements in five key areas:
- Attendance
- Behaviour
- Core skills (literacy and numeracy)
- Subject performance
- Personal development (skills beyond academia)
- Attitudes toward school and their future
We use frequent ‘mini assessments’ to check understanding, and for Key Stage 3 (KS3), we use summative assessments to officially report progress to you, the parent. For Key Stage 4 (KS4) students, mock exams help us track their progress toward their final GCSE goals. This is detailed further in our Assessment Journey Summary
We constantly check on the quality of our curriculum through a regular calendar of activities, including data analysis, lesson observations, work scrutiny, and ‘deep dives’ to ensure our curriculum is effective.
Our curriculum is under constant development but within an overarching strategy which is summarised here: Curriculum Strategy Summary.
Our Curriculum Map can be viewed here: Curriculum Map 25 – 26
Further detail on the sequence of topics followed within our subjects can be viewed here: Curriculum Map – Sequence of Topics 25-26
The college has a Music Development Plan which can be viewed here: Music Development Plan
If you have any further questions about the curriculum at Highfields College, please do not hesitate to get in touch