Our Curriculum Purpose

Our shared intent at Trinity Academy is to provide a curriculum that is highly academic and ambitious for all students, regardless of prior attainment, and that particularly prizes the performing arts and is reflective of our local community.

Each subject curriculum is planned by subject specialists with a strong understanding of the types of knowledge present in their subject. This knowledge can be the facts that students need to know, the procedures students need to learn or even how knowledge itself is created within a subject by specialists.

How the Curriculum is Developed

Individual subject curricula are developed with the school's curriculum purpose in mind and our Trust's curriculum principles in mind. Curriculum leaders develop and refine their subject curriculum through a series of sequential steps, shown below.

1. A clear purpose: Curriculum leaders design a curriculum with a purpose in mind that contributes towards the school’s broader curriculum purpose. Knowledge is selected carefully to allow students to develop a deeper understanding of the world around them.
2. Knowledge as end points: Curriculum leaders specify knowledge as specific and granular end points. Teachers know the end points for every unit and lesson they teach.
3. Sequencing of end points: Each subject curriculum is carefully sequenced so that students develop increasingly rich and complex knowledge. End points are ordered in a way that gives students the best opportunity to learn new things. 
4. Guided by cognitive science: Each subject curriculum is designed to help students remember what they are taught. This means that new material is taught and then revisited at later points in the curriculum. It also means that the volume of new material taught in any given lesson takes into account the limits of working memory.
5. Assessing end points: Assessment is simply a tool to assess students’ understanding of end points and is subservient to the curriculum. We use formative techniques to check for understanding in every lesson and provide precise and immediate feedback. Summative assessment checks learning over a long period of time.

Every student in Year 10 and 11 will study a core set of subjects that will prepare them for either five or six GCSE qualifications – English language, English literature, maths and science (worth either two or three GCSEs). Students will then be able to choose four subjects from a range of fourteen choices (one has to be either Geography or History). To find out more about the GCSEs that are available and details of each course, click on the link below.

Number of Lessons Taught Per Subject, Per Week

The table below shows the number of 50-minute periods each subject is taught across the week.