Intent of curriculum  

Our intent for the curriculum is to provide students with the opportunity to gain, develop and refine some of the key tools that allow students to learn effectively. The curriculum has been structured in a way to remove barriers that may prevent students reaching their potential. The topics provide students with the skills that are transferrable across all subjects, allowing students to implement and refine these skills and strategies throughout Year 7 and beyond.  

Learning to learn aims to provide our students with the necessary life skills and inner confidence in their future with regards to employment and raising students’ self-esteem within social settings. Resilience, working collaboratively with others, communication and confidence amongst other skills will provide students with the confidence both in and out of the classroom to succeed.  

Implementation of curriculum  

The curriculum has been designed to allow students to focus on how they learn, reflect on their current strategies and behaviours, and discover how they can learn more effectively.  The curriculum has been designed to focus upon 6 main topics reading, vocabulary, confidence in the classroom, memory, metacognition, and healthy mindset. Within these topics’ students gain an insight into how they are learning, thinking, and behaving. The sessions are designed to get students to observe that they can question themselves with regards to how they learn, and the curriculum guides them to discover new strategies to help them access the curriculum. Lessons will be a mixture of teacher led, group work, independent work and IT based. Student’s will work through booklets that can then used a resource to aid learning throughout their time at school. 

The teachers of the curriculum will be delivered by numerous teachers across a wide range of subjects and will change annually.  This works to benefit of the subject, gaining new perspectives each year on the topics we cover and reflecting on effective way to deliver these topics is what makes the SOW. Working collaboratively with several teachers across different subjects allows the curriculum to blend well across all subjects.  

The lessons blend with subject content from various subjects and the L2L skills are not taught in isolation but share cross curricular links across the school. Learning to Learning also encapsulates the whole school initiatives within its curriculum including ‘Words Matter’ during the vocabulary module, ‘reading for pleasure’ and ‘Busy Books’ through our reading module and Healthy Mindset – supporting the PSCHE content at Year 7.  

Impact of curriculum  

Learners develop detailed knowledge and skills across the Learning to Learn Curriculum and transfer these skills into all subjects. Students will have their opportunity to reflect on the content they have been taught and review their progress each lesson. Students will take away strategies and key pieces of information that will support them not only during school but will develop their skills ready for the next stage of education, employment, or training.  

Reading – Students will develop skills and the confidence to extract information and promote a positive experience for the students when reading. It will give students the inner confidence and desire to read without feeling overwhelmed at the task of reading.  

Vocabulary – This topic allows students in gain an understanding of key vocabulary used across all subjects at Year 7. Students will become more confident with using academic terms thus challenging students to think about words they could use across the entire curriculum. The impact will be positive for all subjects in that students have a sound understanding of terms that will be frequently used removing barriers to learning.