Curriculum

Here at Oakridge we aim to provide our pupils with a bespoke curriculum that enhances the life chances of all our pupils. We provide a broad, exciting and engaging curriculum that takes into account our different cultures, our local area and our place as a global citizen of the 21^st century. Our curriculum prepares children for the future, develops enquiring minds, promotes a love of learning, facilitates challenge and masters key knowledge, challenges and develops pupils to become independent learners fostering respect for ourselves and others.

We aim for our pupils to make progress by working through our carefully tailored curriculum in which pupils learn key knowledge. This ‘must know’ knowledge is called Golden Nuggets. The curriculum is underpinned by six core threads, which run through the curriculum. These threads were carefully selected based on the context of the school and what we believe our pupils must understand in order to become good global citizens and contribute to society. Each unit focuses on a particular thread with pupils using and consolidating their learning in that unit, and prior learning, to answer the thread questions. When pupils reach year six, time is allocated to allow pupils to use and apply their learning at Oakridge to answer the ‘Big Thread Questions’ drawing together all of their learning and experiences. The Oakridge threads are:

1. Democracy
2. Social Mobility and Aspirations
3. Equality and Diversity  (Role of  Women)
4. Technology and progress
5. Environment
6. Culture and Society

‘These threads are appropriate, ambitious and inspiring to underpin a curriculum for this community in the 21st century.’ Oakridge School Improvement Advisor.

Our curriculum allows for fundamental key skills in maths, reading, writing and spoken language to become embedded, ensuring that knowledge and skills can be applied in a range of contexts and remain in children's long-term memory. With these combined, we aim to enhance the life chances of all our pupils.

All pupils are exposed to experiences outside the classroom that enrich their learning but also focus on their well-being. We achieve this through our vast school grounds; using our local area and a wide range of educational visits and visitors.

The Oakridge team have worked extremely hard to develop language-rich environments so that every child has best possible chance of achieving their potential. We strive to provide challenge and equality of opportunity for all learners through our creative curriculum. We are firm believers that to achieve this, reading is key; therefore, every learner is exposed to high quality books, which promote a love of reading.

Our curriculum is regularly reviewed with the involvement of staff and pupils through the use of pupil voice questionnaires, lesson observations, book looks and the monitoring of planning.

We provide pupils with an unrelenting focus on embedding key skills and frequent opportunities for rehearsal. Oakridge pupils are offered new and enriching experiences to create lifelong learners who are able to apply knowledge, skills and make meaningful links. Above all, our curriculum encourages all learners to be aspirational now and in the future.

Progression

Curriculum leaders have researched and studied their curriculum areas in order to create a series of progression documents for each subject. These outline the sequencing and key knowledge and skills that are to be taught. These documents also specify the key subject and topic vocabulary that we aim to teach the children.

See the links below for further subject breakdowns.