Curriculum
The Dorchester Middle School Curriculum 2019 to 2020
In the previous academic year, the Faculty Leaders undertook a huge project that enabled us to re-evaluate our academic provision and potentially rewrite the entire curriculum. This work started before Ofsted announced their new inspection framework, where more emphasis is placed on the curriculum. The initial stage in this process focused on our intent – what do we want our pupils to learn? What do we want our subject to look like?
Faculty Leaders wrote schemes of work intending to enable deep learning and secure knowledge. The strength of a middle school is the range of foundation subjects on offer, taught by specialists, which gives pupils a head start on their primary school peers on entry to the next phase of their education. In order to reduce workload on staff we reorganized the way we work and created smaller subject specific teams with teachers working in their specialist areas and age groups.
This academic year, 2019 to 2020, has seen us move to the implementation phase where we have worked to put all of these plans into practice. Staff working in smaller teams, have been able to plan together, sharing good practice and keeping up with the latest educational research. Our work is ongoing, never static, and we continually look at the impact of our planning and teaching in order to improve. We adapt the planning and scheme of work to suit the classes we have in front of us, responding to their needs on a daily basis.
This part of the website lays out our intent for pupils, the curriculum in each subject. We implement this everyday, measuring the impact and making subtle changes when required.
For further information please visit https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum
What does your child learn at school each day?
Find information about our curriculum subjects below:
Careers
The Careers policy is currently under review January 2020
Dorchester University (DU)
Dorchester University provides pupils with opportunities to develop and apply their skills beyond the taught curriculum.
Links to other helpful Websites