We have a very carefully structured curriculum with much of Year 9 based around supporting students to make informed choices. The current restrictions will inevitably cause a significant disruption to curriculum arrangements, the scope of which we will not fully understand until schools return to normal operation. However, we would be reckless not to have contingency plans in mind and would like to share our current thoughts with parents to help to alleviate some concerns. We are basing these current contingency arrangements on the likelihood that we will miss a significant proportion of this school term, which as we know, might well change.
September Arrangements:
Year 7
This will be broadly the current curriculum (number of lessons per week shown in brackets):
English (4); maths (4); science (3); languages (3); geography (2); history (2); RE (2); PE (2); art (2); drama (2); music (2); technology (2).
Languages will rotate with a half year of French and a half year of Spanish, switching at February half-term.
The technology rotation will include 2 design & technology units, 1 food unit and 1 ICT unit.
Year 8
The curriculum structure will be identical to Year 7 but the rotated subjects will be slightly different.
As students will have missed much of their second Year 7 language they will continue with this in September, swapping back to their starting language at February half-term.
The technology rotation will include 1 design & technology unit, 1 food unit, 1 computer science unit and 1 ICT unit.
Year 9
There will be no creative option choices for the current Year 8 into Year 9 in September, as they will have missed too much of their creative subject choices to making meaningful decisions. They will therefore continue with the curriculum structure that they are following at the moment. This is:
English (4); maths (4); science (3); languages (3); geography (2); history (2); RE (1); PE (2); art (2); drama (2); ICT (1); music (2); technology (2).
Students will have studied one language for a whole year in Year 7, then a second language for a part year in Year 8. They will continue to study the second language begun in year 8 until their option choices take effect at February half-term, ensuring that they will have had lengthy exposure to both languages.
The technology rotation will include 2 design & technology units, 1 food unit and 1 computer science unit (as much as can be covered in half a year).
Students will start making option choices shortly before Christmas as per the current arrangements.
Year 10
There will be no change to the delivery of the GCSE curriculum already started in March this year.
Year 11
Current Year 10 students will have missed substantial curriculum time which we will need to do all that we can to compensate for. The ‘saving grace’ in this situation is that this will also apply to every Year 11 student in the country. Our curriculum allocations for the core (English, maths and science) are already generous and we do not plan to change these. This covers 5 of the 9 GCSEs the majority of students study. Our 4 option subjects have 3 lessons per week each and finishing the curriculum in them will be challenging. We have therefore taken the extraordinary decision to sacrifice our 2 core PE lessons to give extra curriculum time to GCSE options. Each option will have a 4th lesson each week for half a term at a time, throughout the year. This will equate to an extra 12 to 15 lessons in each, which will compensate for 4 or 5 weeks of lost study, which is as much as we can possibly do under the circumstances.
Year 12
The A level curriculum will be offered and delivered as normal.
Year 13
We will seek opportunities on a subject by subject basis to find additional study time where it is needed.
These arrangements may of course change if circumstances change, but this is our current plan.