Curriculum - The Wales Way
Curriculum Aims
At Wales High School, we want each of our students to access a curriculum that helps them to: develop a love of learning; access important and exciting knowledge; feel included and accepted; nurture lifelong skills, and help them to become well-rounded people, ready and prepared to have successful and happy futures.
We believe our curriculum should challenge students to fulfil their true potential. Students at Wales High School are guided and encouraged to follow a curriculum that prepares them for the next stage in their education or employment journey. We encourage students to view their outcomes not only by academic success, but also by their personal and social development.
The curriculum at Wales High School is built around four key ambitions and priorities:
Skills for Life – ensuring all students have the skills to be successful learners and develop life-long skills that support their future learning and employability. This includes a focus on developing confident and capable readers.
Knowledge for Life – selecting important, exciting and stimulating knowledge that will interest students and develop their love of learning, in addition to providing the foundations for students to access important qualifications.
Prepared for Life – providing students with important knowledge and skills that enable them to be responsible members of society, understand the world they live in and prepare students for safe and successful futures. This includes covering the teaching of British Values, Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education and Relationships and Sex Education
Passions for Life – provide opportunities to bring learning to life and help students find their passions, interests and contribute towards a happy and balanced life.
Curriculum Design
Our curriculum is broad, balanced and aligned with the breadth and ambition of the English National Curriculum.
The curriculum at Wales is ambitious as we carefully select the knowledge we want students to learn. We ensure there are opportunities to revisit knowledge and assess students’ understanding through our classroom practices.
The curriculum is fully sequenced, using pedagogical research to inform our curriculum design. We work closely with our feeder schools to ensure our curriculum builds on the knowledge students gain in Key Stage 2. We build on what students already know to sequence our curriculum carefully from Y7 through to Key Stage 5.
The curriculum encourages students to deepen their knowledge beyond the subject studied, by linking knowledge and understanding between subject disciplines.
We work hard to support struggling readers, develop reading for pleasure and teach vocabulary carefully to help students enhance their reading skills and make links between subjects.
We aim for the curriculum at Wales to be fully inclusive. We offer a balance of academic and vocational qualifications. We adapt how we teach our curriculum for SEND students and in our Integrated Resource – The Bridge – to meet the needs of our students. All of our students have access to the EBACC suite of qualifications at Key Stage 4. An important part of our curriculum is proving enhanced support for struggling readers so they can access the curriculum.
Our curriculum is divided into stages. In Year 7 and 8, students all follow the same route covering the full National Curriculum. In Year 9, students are allowed some flexibility in their curriculum choices, whilst ensuring they still cover the full National curriculum. In Year 10 and 11, students follow GCSEs, or equivalent qualifications. In our Sixth Form, we offer a broad range of A level and Level 3 qualifications, including vocational qualifications and GCSE English and Maths.
