Curriculum

Our Trust Curriculum 

Our central purpose is to ensure that all children and young people within the Northern Ambition Academies Trust achieve the highest standards. We aim to develop and deliver a coherent curriculum that is ambitious, enriched, broad and engaging. One which builds on young people's experiences and prior learning, enabling all of our young people to make progress, to leave our schools equipped with the essential skills they need to contribute effectively to society and to become well-rounded, confident, happy adults.

NAAT defines the curriculum as the ‘totality of a child’s experience’ of education from 3-18, but particularly: 

• The quality of teaching and learning 
• The explicit taught subject knowledge 
• The development of cultural capital  
• The development of broader skills and personal qualities 

 In NAAT Academies children and young people can expect: 

• To be inspired 
• To be inquisitive 
• To be challenged 
• To be ambitious 
• To be nurtured 

We achieve this via a curriculum that is driven by high quality teaching and learning, taught and assessed in order to support our children and young people to build their knowledge and to apply this knowledge as skills. Our curriculum is about ensuring progression by delivering high and age related expectations, increasingly through a Mastery approach. We feel that this: 

Encourages deep subject knowledge 

Enhances subject skills for learning and for life 

Offers enriching opportunities within and beyond the classroom 

We will assess in different ways but always to recognise the skills, attributes and characteristics of our school communities. 

We understand the need for knowledge to underpin the application of skills – our academies will ensure skills are taught alongside the mastery of subject knowledge. 

In NAAT, although made up of individual academies, our essentially, all-through model, recognises the importance of effective transition across Key Stages and of following progressive and developmental phases of learning. Our Hub working is instrumental in ensuring smooth transition. 

As a consequence of our curriculum model our expectations for each of our pupils are for them to: 

• Be ambitious and want to be the best they can be in whatever they choose to do 
• Be brave, be able to work independently and interdependently 
• Respect others and grow as a person 
• Be a positive and an active member of their school community 
• Be lifelong readers with a love of reading 
• Be employable 

All staff within our academies must have a firm and common understanding of the curriculum intent and what it means in practice. At NAAT, we expect the work that our pupils are expected to do, to match the curriculum aims and to be consistently of a high quality. In order for this to happen, we ensure that teachers have access to focused and effective professional development and are supported with work load and wellbeing.  

Our Trust Curriculum Expectations

Inspired

Inquisitive

Challenged

Ambitious

Nurtured