Ensuring an exceptional curriculum

How does Aldridge Education work to ensure that our curriculum is of an exceptional standard?

• We have an agreed Aldridge Standard for our curriculum resources. Schools are able to use co-created resources in English, Maths, Science and Humanities or can work to the same standards with their local resources.
• We have a curriculum review tool that we use across our schools which helps us to ensure that the intent (Ofsted word) of our curriculum is strong. It also helps us to undertake periodic review and to make sure that if gaps exist, we are steadily working on these.  Curriculum work is massive and is one of those areas that is never really finished because it requires constant adjustment and refinement as things change (which they are prone to do).
• We make sure that finding gaps in learning and understand what our students do and don’t know is both written in to our curriculum resources and a mindset that we all deploy. This is all part of what we call ‘data-driven instruction’ – ie our teaching is shaped by what we know about our students’ learning to date.
• We spend time together reviewing what our students know and don’t know and we co-plan regularly as teams to ensure that we have a coherent approach to closing the gaps we have sought out.
• We believe that coaching is an absolute entitlement for our student-facing staff and we use our See It Name It Do It model to facilitate supportive and developmental coaching. When we visit a classroom, we do so to help upskill every staff member so that all of our people can be influencers of great outcomes; we don’t visit a classroom to judge or to grade teaching.  We have a shared set of most-frequently-required action steps that we use to underpin our professional development offer.

At Aldridge Education we seek to be in the work together. We have a shared approach to curriculum and culture that provides a Trust-wide framework which schools implement and interpret in light of their local context. We believe this model allows our students and staff to succeed together. We are Aldridge.