Vision 

At Prince Albert High School, our school motto is ‘Laudem Venari Studemus’ – Pursuit of Excellence, this means that we ensure that our students are equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to go onto the best destinations and are enabled to become excellent in their chosen field. This is underpinned by the Prince Albert Community Trust’s purpose to “Enable every pupil to succeed at school and in life” and our ambition to be ‘Exceptional’.

Intent

To achieve our vision, students study a traditional curriculum which is ambitious, stays as broad as possible for as long as possible and is designed to give all pupils, particularly disadvantaged pupils (including pupils with SEND) the knowledge, skills and understanding they need to enable them to understand the world they live in. This will empower our students to take advantage of opportunities, responsibilities and experiences throughout life ensuring that they can participate actively and positively in wider society.

Our curriculum is planned and sequenced so that the ambitious end points are clear and that pupils develop their knowledge and skills by building on what has been learned before. This will mean that our students leave school with the academic qualifications which best support them to achieve their future aspirations thus empowering them to follow the career path of their choice with confidence.

At PA High, we ensure that our curriculum has rigour so that pupils learn the knowledge that they need to answer subject-specific questions and to gain disciplinary knowledge of how each subject works. This results in students who are confident and competent young people that have developed a love of learning across a number of disciplines. We aim to grow this passion for learning through a range of memorable experiences both within and outside of the curriculum.

Implementation

To ensure effective delivery of the curriculum, the statutory requirements for each subject within the key stages are identified. This is planned as a logically sequenced structure that creates a narrative over time that enables students to make links to prior and future learning. Each subject discipline aims for students to develop strong foundations of knowledge before they move on to the next phase of study. We believe that knowledge begets knowledge. Our subject leads have a detailed understanding of the curriculum structure and sequence. They recognise how each lesson’s learning fits into the students’ broader development within the subject and, through this, they have planned the key knowledge over time. Our subject leads think deeply about how content needs to be explained to students and their staff teams, so it is embedded into their working and subsequently, long term memory. Each unit of work has assessment built in allowing students to practice knowledge retrieval and show understanding before the end of term assessments. Opportunities for discourse and structured talk are also built in so that dialogue is practiced and students become confident to speak like an expert in the subjects they study.

Below is a link to our subject curriculum overviews which demonstrate the sequencing of topics that each student will study, in each subject, throughout the academic year and beyond.

Click here for the Subject Curriculum Overviews

Impact 

The impact of our curriculum at PA High is that all pupils, particularly disadvantaged pupils (including those with SEND) acquire the knowledge and cultural capital that will enable them to succeed at school and in life. Through successfully navigating their way through our curriculum, we believe our students will have learned what is required for them to be able to make exceptional progress in that they know more, remember more and can do more.

We aim for all our students at PA High to be able to read to an age -appropriate level and fluency so that they are capable of accessing the whole curriculum and in turn will produce work of high- quality. This will result in them, where relevant, achieving well in examinations and being well prepared for their next destination throughout their learning journey, whether that be education, training or employment. This includes pupils in sixth form being ready to go on to appropriate, high- quality destinations.