Our Curriculum Vision

At Ravens Wood School, our curriculum is at the heart of our provision. Choosing what we teach, when we teach it and why we teach it, is subject to rigorous discussion and ongoing reflection.

Our curriculum vision, which informs our curriculum choices is below:

• To develop students’ characters as successful leaders through the study of a broad range of powerful knowledge.
• To provide an inclusive education for all RWS learners, through a taught curriculum of awe and wonder.
• To ensure that the curriculum models, at every opportunity, a culture of mutual respect, enabling students to contribute as global citizens.

These keywords remind us of our collective vision; that our curriculum should be broad, filled with powerful knowledge deliberately taught, inclusive for all students, and with content selected and taught to fill students with awe and wonder, delivered in a culture of mutual respect.

A summary of our key curriculum choices, based on our vision, is available at the bottom of this page.

Our approach to our curriculum planning and choices is informed by ongoing research within the wider educational landscape. Some of our key inspirations are below:

• The knowledge we choose to impart should allow our students to ‘think the unthinkable and the not yet thought’. This knowledge unlocks freedom for young people. (Basil Bernstein).
• A threshold concept can be considered as akin to a portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. It represents a transformed way of understanding, or interpreting, or viewing something without which the learner cannot progress.  (Professors Jan Meyer and Ray Land, developed further by David Didau).
• Your curriculum is your school. So, to the greatest extent possible, it pays to own it, to shape it and to celebrate it. Here's our curriculum. This is what we are. This is what we do. And we're proud of it. (Tom Sherrington).

(one of our curriculum workshops)