Curriculum

On entry to the school, Laura, the Headteacher, along with the teaching staff and the Therapy Team, will undertake a thorough baseline assessment.

This assessment will identify where children are in terms of their learning (literacy skills, numeracy skills and science) and will also assess emotional development. This initial assessment will inform how we work with each student.

Ongoing assessment is used to inform how pupils are progressing against this baseline assessment. Red Moor School’s senior staff and therapy team will meet on at least a half termly basis to identify pupils who are not progressing as expected so that action plans can be developed to help implement and evaluate intervention strategies.

What is the INTENT of our curriculum?

All staff at Red Moor school are committed to delivering “the best education for every child”.

The aim of our broad and balanced curriculum is to ensure children leave our school with tolerance and respect for others, emotional resilience, good social skills and the best outcomes possible.

Red Moor School Faculties

To help ensure that we offer the BEST education for every child, Red Moor School has nine faculties of education within the school, each with a Faculty Lead, who oversees the provision for that faculty, and ensures that the planning allows for clear sequence and progression in the knowledge, skills and understanding required for success in each subject that falls under their faculty. Click the Faculties below to find out more:

• Maths
• Science
• English – encompassing an overview of reading across the school, phonics (using the Monster Phonics Scheme) literacy, speaking and listening, media and both English Literature and Language GCSEs
• The Arts – encompassing art, music, drama and dance
• Technologies – encompassing design and technology, catering, and computing
• Outdoor Education – encompassing outdoor education and Duke of Edinburgh award
• Humanities – encompassing history, geography, RE and SMSC
• Enrichment – encompassing all aspects of enrichment across the curriculum including aspects of health education, such as PE.
• Personal Development – encompassing PSHE and citizenship.

Each faculty has a Faculty Handbook which is available on their faculty page or by contacting the school on enquiries@redmoorschool.co.uk, alongside the long-term planning for each subject within the faculty. This handbook clearly lays out the intent of the curriculum for each subject within the faculty, as well as how the faculty plans to implement this.

How do we measure the impact of our curriculum?

At Red Moor School staff use an online platform called SOLAR (Special On Line Academic Records) to record student attainment and assessments across all subjects taught at the school. This system uses the Red Moor Steps Assessment Framework. Red Moor Steps covers a broad range of ability, from the ‘Foundation Learning Skills’ (FLS) that cover Early Years education, through to the main ‘Steps’ curriculum that takes students from year 1 through to year 11 and GCSE criteria, broadly in line with the National Curriculum.

This helps to provide staff with additional guidance on the sequence and progression of knowledge and skills within the curriculum, and to ensure that learning builds upon prior attainment.

Each Step of the framework represents the corresponding academic year – so a child working on Step 5 would be working broadly in line with students in year 5 at a mainstream school.

The expectation for progress for students is that they will cover 80% of the curriculum each year to achieve mastery of that step, before moving on to the next step.

Within the framework, students are assessed at three levels against each objective – emerging, developing or secure. Teachers use their judgment and evidence from work completed to assess student progress. Our expectation is that no child is judged to be secure in their knowledge of an objective until there is a minimum of three pieces of evidence of them completing the given skill, with an appropriate degree of independence.

All assessments recorded by staff are subject to both internal and external moderation practices. As well as Heads of Faculty continuing to strengthen local partnerships for moderation, the SOLAR system also allows all staff to send evidence files out to all other SOLAR schools for moderation and are encouraged to completed this at a minimum of once per term.

Students are encouraged to gain external accreditation for their learning from the earliest opportunity. This can be through a range of awarding bodies, such as the AQA Unit Award Schemes, Functional Skills, ASDANs and Entry Level Qualifications. The aspirational goal for all students is that they leave with GCSEs, or the highest level of appropriate qualifications they can access, within their areas of interest and ability.

Meeting Additional Needs

The majority of pupils attending Red Moor School have an Education, Health and Care Plan, often related to social, emotional, mental health difficulties and associated behaviours that challenge, that have proven too severe to have been successfully addressed within mainstream schools.

Specialist support for our children, through both the delivery of the programmes of study and personalised learning programmes, will be integrated into the curriculum and into teaching and learning.  Our staff and students will benefit from the close support of our extensive therapy team to further develop their expertise. The Therapy team include Educational Psychologists, Occupational Therapists, Speech and Language Therapists, Play therapist, Music Therapist and access to a wider range of other therapeutic interventions. .  The curriculum is delivered by qualified, skilled, empathetic and experienced staff team operating in a warm, safe, nurturing and state of the art learning environment.

All students will have additional support identified on their ‘Student Passport’.  This document identifies classroom strategies, curricular targets, behaviour targets and trigger points. They are child-centred documents and are updated regularly in consultation with the pupil, their family and relevant professionals. Any specialist intervention will focus on specific areas of difficulty, identifying appropriate strategies, assessment methods and time scales for evaluation.

The school believes that it is of particular importance that all who work within the learning environment develop positive relationships. Thus, all those involved in course delivery, management of pupils and the provision for individual needs work together to ensure learning.  This will include not only staff from the school and the pupils themselves but also parents/carers and external providers such as college, work experience placements, etc.

Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural Education

At Red Moor School we are committed to developing our students Social, Moral, Spiritual and Cultural Education. As part of this provision, we ensure that partisan political views are not promoted in the teaching of any subject.

This is closely monitored through a wide range of quality assurance activities including, but not limited to, lesson observations and monitoring of planning and the curriculum where appropriate. All staff at Red Moor School, and visitors, will be regularly reminded that it is inappropriate to share partisan political views with any students or their families. Any breach of this will result in disciplinary action being taken at an appropriate level.

Fundamental British Values

Red Moor School actively encourages pupils to respect the Fundamental British Values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs, throughout the curriculum delivery, teaching and learning in the school. These values underpin all teaching and learning at Red Moor School, however, are also explicitly taught through assemblies, PSHCE and through the students taking an active role in the school council.

Specifically, we aim to ensure that pupils have an understanding and knowledge of:

• How citizens can influence decision-making through the democratic process
• An appreciation that living under the rule of law protects individual citizens
• An understanding that bodies such as the police and the army can be held to account by the people, through the democratic organs of government
• An understanding that the freedom to hold other faiths and beliefs is protected in law, and an acceptance that other people having different faiths or beliefs to oneself (or having none) should not be the cause of prejudicial or discriminatory behaviours
• An understanding of the problems of identifying and combating discrimination

Our Foundation Curriculum

At Red Moor School, we have several classes tailored to meet the individual needs of pupils within the foundation curriculum group (KS1, KS2 and KS3). Most can access learning through group work, whilst others have an individual provision or a mix of both. We also have the flexibility to allow children to move between classes to best fit their needs.

In addition to addressing the mainstream curriculum requirements, we also aim to meet individual needs according to advice from fellow professionals, as and when required, or as an additional support to any pupils we feel are struggling.

We use the Trauma Informed Schools (TIS) approach and ‘Motional’ to assess the children’s emotional and developmental needs and ensure that we can meet these needs in order to make sure that every child is actually ready to learn, enjoys being at school, and is able to fully access all the learning opportunities we can provide.

At Red Moor School we use as many cross curricular links, and links to student’s interests, as we can to ensure that the learning makes sense to the pupils. Wherever possible we build in practical links to life skills so that the pupils know why they need to know what we are teaching them.

We also provide as many outdoor education opportunities as possible to ensure that the children gain as much life experience as we can provide, as well as giving them the chance to find an area in which they naturally excel.  These opportunities include swimming, sailing, surfing, forest school, farm experiences and many more. These facilities do not just enhance the learning opportunities for the children, but show them that, despite possible previous negative educational experiences, we are here to support them and help them to deal with situations that they may have found tricky in the past, whilst making education enjoyable.

We use various tried and tested resources to help support the emotional development of our children, including anger management, emotional literacy, social skills, and include various techniques. We have access to an extensive outdoor play area – whether the weather is wet or dry. During these outdoor activities, we encourage independent play, as well as social interaction with other adults and pupils.

Every student we support has a personalised timetable which outlines the provision we can offer at Red Moor School. Provision for each student is regularly monitored to ensure the best outcomes.

Options Curriculum (KS4)

In KS4 all children will be offered options alongside a core curriculum of English, Maths and Science, Physical and/or Outdoor Education, Citizenship and Relationships and Health Education.

Students will get the opportunity to choose from a range of vocational, technical and academic qualifications including (but not limited to);

• GCSE in English, Maths, Science, Art, Citizenship, DT, History, Media Studies, Sociology, Textiles
• BTEC Awards/Certificates in Vocational Studies – following a choice of pathway; Caring for Children, Home Cooking Skills, Sport and Active Leisure, vCert in Graphic Design, Young Enterprise Project, Junior Sports Leader Award
• Arts Award at Bronze or Silver Level
• ASDAN Short Courses
• Duke of Edinburgh Bronze Award