Curriculum Rationale

Oak Trees Multi Academy Trust Curriculum Rationale

All Oak Trees’ schools are firmly committed to our Trust mission: ‘Achieving Excellence Together.’

The teaching and learning of our curriculum enables adults and children to fulfil this vision by:

• having the belief that everyone has the power to inspire, the power to change and the power to achieve excellence in their own way,
• unlocking potential through knowledge, creativity, application, practice, discovery and passion,
• enabling the community to work together to create greatness inside and outside of the classroom,
• raising aspirations and inspiring children to be ambitious and develop a lifelong love of learning,
• dedicating our well balanced, child centred curriculum to ensure the intellectual, spiritual, cultural and physical development of every child to equip them for life in our society.

Our knowledge-rich curriculum is based on the MAT values, ‘Collaboration, Expression, Citizenship and Inspiration’ and is designed to ensure children and staff have opportunities to:

• work well together, support each other and treat each other with respect – the Trust is built on strong and positive relationships
• work together for the benefit of our families and staff focusing on all areas – we are a team!
• focus on best practice, sharing the good things, high quality training and support and challenge to inspire our staff and pupils – not imposing improvement
• maintain and promote each school’s uniqueness and individuality

A key principle of the Oak Trees MAT is that each school has autonomy on its curriculum intent. i.e. the planned knowledge it wants its pupils to learn.

Central to the core values of Oak Trees is that collaboration is at the heart of school improvement and for this reason, each school will implement its curriculum according to the following agreed principles:

1. Learning is a change to long term memory and if nothing has been altered in long term memory, nothing has been learned;

2. Each school’s curriculum will:

• Link strongly to the Oak Trees values above;
• Be progressive, knowledge-rich and based on ideas from cognitive science;
• Be based on key concepts which allow pupils to make links and put their understanding into context;
• Be delivered creatively, to engage and excite pupils;
• Provide high challenge, repeated practice and low stakes testing;
• Be underpinned by purposeful assessment which guides teaching;

3. Teaching staff will have the pedagogical understanding and subject knowledge to deliver the curriculum effectively.

Intent, Implementation and Impact

On each school website you will be able to see the Intent, Implementation and Impact of the schools’ curriculum delivery within their school.

Each school delivers their curriculum under the framework of the MAT curriculum rationale above but bespoke to the individual nature and needs of their community. MAT leaders work collaboratively to ensure an agreed strategic direction for the curriculum under the MAT umbrella, but it is down to the individual schools to ensure that their curriculum is of the highest quality for their pupils.

The rationale above highlights the elements of the curriculum which are common and those where the schools have the discretion to innovate for the individual and unique communities of each school.