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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 

At Bury Church of England we believe in the transformative power of knowledge to fulfil the aspirations of all our students to ensure success beyond school life and to achieve our school vision of ‘let your light shine’. Our aspirational, bespoke curriculum looks to embed, yet go beyond, the national curriculum. 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.

Alongside striving for the highest academic achievement for our students, we also have a significant emphasis within our curriculum on personal development, reading for pleasure and STEAM subjects. Our ambitious bespoke curriculum ensures all students gain the necessary experiences to compete academically, spiritually, morally and socially in the wider world. 

 

Curriculum vision

The vision for 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 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. 

 

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
STEAM 1
PSHE/Citizenship/Enrichment 2

Key Stage 4 lessons

Subject Lessons per week
Maths 4
English 4
Combined Science 5 (6 for Triple science)
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)