Our Curriculum Intent

Out intent for our curriculum at Orion is to ensure our students master reading, writing and mathematical understanding to enable them to access their world. We aim to enrich and develop our students through our values being rooted in the following: 

Ambition – aspirational in what we can offer our students ensuring we deliver with the highest of expectations. Our intent is driven through the lens of our 6 characteristics. This being that we deliberately develop these characteristics in each lesson, linking them into our long term plans.

Active Compassion – ensuring our students have opportunities to build empathy and kindness and understanding of others around them in their world. Ensuring we have a curriculum that supports positive mental health. 

Creativity – building the opportunities to problem solve, show resilience, building strength in our young people to overcome barriers and build a growth mindset “I can do” and “ I am not there yet “ attitude. 

Confidence – Builds our students feelings of self-belief through identifying their own growth on character. Build the opportunities to work collaboratively with others and part of a team.

The breath of our curriculum has three main goals: 

Appropriate experiences – we want to enable our students to develop as confident, responsible citizens. Within the curriculum we aim for our students to work collaboratively and develop independence. We believe this will develop their character. We are constantly review our curriculum to ensure local context and our community needs are being addressed.

Cultural Capital is the background of the world that our students need to infer meaning from to ensure equity of access to their world. It is about being mindful to what they read and to create schema to allow them to learn more about the world they are growing up in. We want to ensure strong vocabulary development, this will help our students to express themselves in a mature way.  We believe in achieving our pledge the cultural capital developed will allow our students to access further education and roles that they aspire to achieve despite their disability and current life experiences.

Coherently planned academic curriculum – We are constantly reviewing our curriculum to ensure we provide a coherent, well-structured academic curriculum that leads to sustained mastery for all and a greater depth of understanding.

We implement our curriculum through subject weightings that are driven by the needs of our community. We have a curriculum that provides a breath of opportunity that holds personal development at the forefront. It is vital that our students develop themselves as individual with the skills they will need to be successful as adults.

Curriculum Weighting:

English and Communication – 5 periods
Maths – 5 periods
Physical Education and Fitness – 3 periods
Digital Learning – 2 periods
Personal , Social , Citizenship and Health Education – 3 periods
RE – 1 period
Personal Development and Structured Social Development – 6 periods (including enrichment)
Science – 2 periods
Careers and Aspirations – 2 periods