Curriculum Vision

At Dawlish College, our curriculum exemplifies our core values: ‘We work hard,’ ‘We work together’, and ‘We make things better.’ The principle that guides our curriculum vision is participation. We believe that a well-taught, high-quality curriculum should equip students with knowledge that will allow them to participate meaningfully in the world - i.e. It should empower them to take ownership of how they engage in the world.

In practice, this means our curriculum should do three things:
Ensure students can direct the course of their future study and employment prospects.
Endow students with the essential knowledge that will enable them to contribute to wider cultural life and the social and political conversations of the day.
Enrich students' lives through an appreciation of knowledge for its own sake.

To help us achieve these goals, we ask three questions that support and underpin our curriculum design and monitoring. They are:
Is this ambitious?
What essential knowledge does this provide?
How are we promoting reading and literacy?

i) ambition
Our curriculum is ambitious because we think about how we can teach our students the best knowledge we have. Each of our subjects design a curriculum that is taught to all students so they can participate in school life. Within this, we carefully select and sequence the knowledge that is taught to our children to ensure that it is ambitious. We do this, for example, through careful selection of texts in literature.

At Dawlish College, we believe our students can participate meaningfully in the world. To support this, we teach students powerful knowledge that allows students to think beyond their everyday experiences and make generalisations. To do this, we teach a curriculum that is rich in knowledge and broad and balanced.

ii) essential knowledge
Our ambitious curriculum approach combined with a regular review of its offer ensures that the futures of all students attending Dawlish College are not restricted by the curriculum. Our curriculum aims to increase students' essential knowledge, opening opportunities for our students to choose how they participate in further study and employment or by allowing them to participate in wider social, cultural, and political conversations of society.

iii) reading and literacy
While we believe that reading is an essential part of any child’s education, students being able to read it is not enough. At school, students read regularly to develop fluency and familiarity with literature of all kinds. Students who read regularly are more likely to appreciate knowledge for its own sake and are in a better position to become lifelong learners as they have access to the world’s supply of knowledge, in turn increasing their future study and employment prospects and allowing them more opportunity to shape or change how they participate in the world. To do this, we promote disciplinary literacy. That is, reading and literacy in all subjects - not simply English. Consequently, our students become fluent in the language and vocabulary of all the subjects they study in school.
Our curriculum is designed to be ambitious, broad, balanced, and challenging, yet supportive and individualised through scaffolding and chunked lessons. We believe in equality of opportunity. Our academic curriculum gives all learners, especially those with SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disability) and from disadvantaged backgrounds, access to the deepest learning experience.

Our curriculum is viewed as a progressive five-year learning journey with a strong focus on the key concepts within subject disciplines so that we build on our learners’ experiences at Primary School and their individual needs so that we can ensure equity and equality of opportunity so that all can enjoy a successful transition to post-16.

Our subject teams of reflective specialist practitioners work collaboratively to plan and deliver schemes of learning that construct a clear and coherent subject-specific curriculum over five years that enables students to make links within and across topics. Our schema intuitively builds our students’ knowledge, skills and understanding over time, incorporating regular, personalised, and formative assessments of their learning so that we are fully confident that progress is made, and that knowledge and skills are firmly embedded in our students’ long-term memories.

On a moral level, it is a curriculum that reflects our societal values of personal development, spirituality, economic well-being, healthy lifestyle, inclusivity, and democracy so that our students can live successful and happy lives in a culturally diverse modern world, feeling confident that they have grown intellectually, morally, aesthetically, creatively, emotionally, and physically because of their time at Dawlish College.