Kingstone High School’s Curriculum Principles

At Kingstone High School, every child is given the opportunity to develop their knowledge, skills  and behaviours to become active, positive members of our community and wider society as a whole.   

We believe that a strong, knowledge driven curriculum with clear outcomes helps students succeed and generates, in them, a love of learning.

We have created a curriculum that provides all students with a broad and balanced experience to enable them to become confident and thoughtful learners. 

Our curriculum:

• Builds on students’ prior learning creating a strong foundation for the exam years and further study
• Supports our four teaching principles of chunking, modelling, scaffolding and checking for understanding so that all students can access the material and make positive progress
• Focuses on embedding the core knowledge and vocabulary to help students feel secure when tackling more complex concepts, tasks or theories
• Is chunked to support knowledge retention and is sequenced effectively to provide opportunities for key aspects of the learning to be reviewed, revised and revisited
• Is given a context, with the Big Picture, so there is an understanding of how the learning fits and links to the subject and the wider world
• Has clear endpoints that monitor the success and progress of the individual
• Reinforces the importance of reading and promotes high standards of literacy and numeracy

At KS3

At KS3, the school provides all students the opportunity to study a core EBacc offer of maths, English, science, languages, Geography and History alongside PE, Music, Music Technology, Design and Technology, Art, Drama, RE and SPHERE (run through our tutor programme).

Students complete a three-year KS3 with some subjects incorporating transition to GCSE within that time.  All students are provided with a broad and balanced curriculum before they specialise, in the Spring of Year 9, depending on personal preferences and future career ambitions.  Each year, option blocks are customised to meet the needs of the year group and offer a bespoke programme for them.  A comprehensive careers programme is in place to support the option process.

Students are taught in mixed ability form classes in Year 7 based on information gathered during the transition process.  These are refined in Year 8 and 9 and broadly set around language ability which further supports our language uptake for EBacc.

There is targeted provision and intervention for those students in Year 7 and 8 to develop and support any social, behavioural, emotional and well-being needs which have been, or could be, barriers to their learning and attainment.   

The core subjects of English, Maths and Science have a dedicated HLTA working within the faculty to provide high quality, immediate intervention and support in these key subjects.   

At KS4

At KS4, the school provides students with the opportunity to studying the core subjects of maths, English and science (including Tripe Science) along with the foundation subjects of computing, PE and PSHE (which is delivered through our SPHERE tutor programme as in KS3).  Choosing EBacc subjects of English, maths, the sciences, history or geography and a language is heavily encouraged to provide students with a broad and balanced curriculum as possible.   

We offer students a wide range of other GCSE opportunities: Art and Design, Music, Media Studies, Ethics, Business Studies, Design and Technology, Food and Nutrition, Computing and PE.  Alongside this, we provide students with opportunities to study alternative, vocational Level 2 qualifications in Travel and Tourism, Childcare and Sport.

Functional Skills from Entry Level to Level 2, in English and Maths, are also timetabled for those students who would benefit from achieving success in these core areas.

The core subjects of English, Maths and Science each have a dedicated HLTA working within the faculty to provide high quality, immediate intervention and support in these key subjects.  

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At Kingstone High School, our curriculum, both at Key Stage 3 and 4, reinforces our core values of

 kindness, respect and perseverance and reinforces our school motto of

‘Achieving Success Together’.

Each curriculum subject has information about what is studied in each year group. Click on the links on the right to find information for each curriculum area.  The Options Booklets provide detailed information about the KS4 courses we offer.