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Bury CE High School

BURY CE HIGH SCHOOL
A Church of England Academy with the vision to empower all students to let their light shine.

Curriculum 

Curriculum vision

Our school’s Christian values of “respect, responsibility and resilience” and our commitment to fulfilling the Church of England’s vision for education are at the heart of our curriculum. Our curriculum aims to inspire all students within our context to “let their light shine” and to “live life in all its fullness”. We have a thorough understanding of the needs of our students, their families and the wider community and our curriculum is designed to meet those needs. We aim to build hope and optimism within our students, helping them to cope in difficult situations and give them the skills and knowledge to thrive later in life. We will do this by developing respectful, responsible and resilient young people, who are highly knowledgeable, strive for excellence and advocate courageously for social justice. 

The vision for our curriculum is that: 

  • Students will uphold strong Christian values, always striving to let their light shine  
  • Students will be responsible citizens who respect everybody in school, the wider community and beyond  
  • Students will be mentally and physically resilient  
  • Students will experience creativity and curiosity  
  • Students will experience a knowledge rich curriculum that is broad and balanced, deepens over time and exposes them to a wide variety of texts 
 

Curriculum design

At Bury Church of England High School, we believe in the transformative power of knowledge as a gift from God, enabling every student to flourish and fulfil their God-given potential. Our curriculum is designed to support the aspirations of all learners, equipping them for success beyond school and guiding them to live out our Christian vision: “Let your light shine” (Matthew 5:16).

Our aspirational, bespoke, broad and balanced curriculum is designed around deepening knowledge over time and is rooted in the national curriculum. All students can thrive within EBacc subjects alongside our broad offer of option subjects including a range of vocational qualifications. Alongside our drive for academic success, there is a large emphasis within our curriculum on personal development, reading for pleasure and spiritual growth to ensure students gain the necessary experiences to compete academically, practically and morally and socially in the wider world. We aim to nurture students who are not only knowledgeable but also wise, compassionate, and courageous - ready to serve others and contribute to the common good.

To complement our knowledge rich curriculum, a fundamental aim of our pedagogical approach is to embed core knowledge in our student's long-term memory and ensure effective schema building. This is achieved by having a central focus on retrieval practice in every lesson.  

Curriculum principles

Our curriculum is designed around five core principles.  

The Bury Church curriculum: 

  • Exposes all learners to a well-sequenced curriculum focused on declarative and procedural knowledge within the subject discipline.  
  • Uses retrieval practice to strengthen learners' memory of the critical knowledge.  
  • Elicits deeper thinking, opportunities for practice and application of knowledge.  
  • Ensures that all learners experience high challenge and low threat.  
  • Ensures key vocabulary is identified and pre-taught. 

 

Spirituality in the curriculum

Our curriculum aims to develop responsible, respectful and active citizens who play a positive role in the local community. Through our curriculum we actively encourage students to develop an understanding of their moral and spiritual responsibility to reflect on and positively improve themselves, the school and the wider community. We want students to reflect wisely, learn with integrity and cooperate well with peers, staff and other people in the local community to make a positive change.

Within the curriculum students experience awe and wonder from studying Mount Everest in Geography, learning how to play the ukele in Music and reflecting on what it would be like to be the only person on a planet in Science.

Our bespoke SHINE curriculum encompasses PSHCE, Action for change and social action work in the local community.

SHINE curriculum lessons focus on development of social action projects in the community. Students reflect on who they are and what it means to be a Bury Church student working together to contribute in a positive way to improving the lives of others. We aim for students to build a positive reputation for our school by empathising with others and working together to improve the lives of people in our local community.

The Action for Change curriculum supports students to reflect on how their behaviours and the behaviours of their peers, the school and the local community maybe contributing to the problems that our planet faces. Students are guided to identify the issues and take positive steps to develop a more sustainable planet. 

We regularly celebrate our students through our Shine awards and half-termly celebratory events. We want our staff and students to know that we appreciate them and are thankful for what is good in life and these events enable us to achieve this.

Spirituality in the Curriculum Booklet 

 

Reading for pleasure

At Bury Church, we have developed a culture of reading for both our staff and students. We dedicate thirty minutes a day in our curriculum time for our students to read for pleasure with their form tutor. This shared experience promotes a wealth of rich discussions and promotes reading for pleasure for all our students.

 

Our comprehensive reading programme for each year group:

  • has links to our school values of ‘let your light shine’​.
  • has cultural significance​ for our students.
  • focuses on interesting subject matter.
  • includes a diverse selection of authors. ​
  • provides lexical challenge​.
  • is age appropriate​.
  • develops links across the entire curriculum.

 

Our reading curriculum entitles our students to: 

  • hear a range of diverse voices.
  • travel around the world and experience different cultures.​
  • explore morality and resilience in range of contexts​.
  • travel across time from 1818 to 2016.​
  • access highly regarded, culturally significant, award-winning texts.

 

 

Students also have a wide variety of books available to them in the library that they can access at break and lunch each day.

Curriculum logistics

Students have six lessons a day that are fifty minutes long. 

Key Stage 3 lessons

KS3 Subject Lessons per week
Maths 4
English 4
Science 3
Religious Education 2
Geography 2
History 2
French 2
Physical Education 2
Art 1
Music 1
Drama 1
Computing 1
Action for Change 1
PSHE/Citizenship/Enrichment 2

Key Stage 4 lessons

Subject Lessons per week
Maths 4
English 4
Combined Science 5 (6 for Triple science in Y10-Y11 2024 and 8 for Triple science in Y10-Y11 2025 )
Religious Education 3
Option subjects 3
Physical Education 2
PSHE/RSHE 1
Citizenship/Digital literacy/Careers 1
Core subject intervention 1

 

Curriculum subjects

Curriculum-Gallery (ID 1005)