Learning and Teaching

Seven Kings Curriculum

Our intent is to ensure all our young people leave Seven Kings with agency over their lives, to be able to follow an ambitious Plan A to their next destination whether they leave at the end of KS4 or KS5. We believe there is no ceiling to achievement and that all students should not only follow the National Curriculum and the GCSE specification but go beyond e.g. through offering Mandarin in EYFS, through all learners sitting the short course in Religious Studies in Year 9 alongside and in their Learn 2 lesson, drawing together their learning around metacognition and revision strategies, so they can test their understanding against the examined curriculum and experience success. We offer a broad, flexible options system of 17 subjects at KS4 and 19 subjects at KS5 to ensure all our young people receive a rich, high quality education. Such a well designed curriculum tackles disadvantage, ensures robust progress and allows our young people to access and be prepared for life beyond Seven Kings School.

Our curriculum is rooted in our commitment to grow the whole child, creating life-long learners who embrace opportunities and know how to create agency in their own lives, it is relevant and appropriate. It is anchored in our core principles of Friendship Excellence Opportunity.  We have made a long-term commitment to prioritising the importance of the pedagogies of talk and reading at Seven Kings; this is underpinned by a moral purpose that all children deserve the opportunity to become effective communicators, cultivating participation and leadership and to have the skills to be ambitious about their futures, taking ownership of their futures and developing as critical thinkers, flexible and independent learners.

  • Friendship: Our curriculum creates safe-spaces where children are encouraged and enabled to find their voice, learn how to listen and talk with purpose and how to use talk to think, learn and apply their knowledge. They are taught to be aware of their language and its power, influence and impact and to challenge where talk is negative to another’s development, to ‘watch your language’.
  • Excellence: Our curriculum promotes scholarship, challenge and mastery through teaching a growing body of substantive knowledge which sparks higher order thinking, disciplinary literacy which pushes students to move beyond reading, writing, listening, and viewing solely for academic purposes, indeed mastery. High expectations and a rigorous commitment to AFL which permeates the curriculum growing reflective, evaluative and questioning learners, ensuring ambition for all and to check we are challenging all students in this aim as experts in the classroom. We model excellence in the classroom and have high expectations of our learners within and outside the classroom and beyond.
  • Opportunity: Our curriculum creates systematic and thoughtfully sequenced opportunities for students to grow their knowledge through reading high quality texts from Early Years to Key Stage 5 and a commitment to guiding and supporting reading throughout the curriculum and beyond. We challenge through effectively differentiated questioning which drives progress for all and a balance between rigorous planning and knowing when to take the opportunities for learning in the classroom that students generate every day, memorable learning. We take every opportunity to use our location to enrich our students’ lives, empowering knowledge which enables them to compete with the very best through growing our learner’s landscape so they are able to compete as global citizens.

 

Learning and Teaching: Why We Exist as a School

The Learning and Teaching Policy is Seven Kings’ DNA underpinning all of our work as an all-through school. At the start of every academic year we bring the policy alive to ensure high expectations of all staff for all children. It is rooted in the principles of Assessment for Learning, as the pilot school of Dylan Wiliam’s work.

We know what happens in the classroom has a fundamental impact on the physical and mental well being of each child as well as their life chances: it is our responsibility to get it right and to be ambitious for all children.

Key Principles:

  • There is no ceiling to achievement – intelligence can be developed and we can all learn to learn through adaptive, responsive and ambitious teaching
  • Students must be taught to think and evaluate to have a voice and opinion within and outside the classroom
  • Every student has the right to be successful and the ability to achieve
  • Every student must know what to do in order to improve and how to do it through high quality regular feedback: high expectations on their own are not enough
  • Consistency of experience is vital as is outstanding Behaviour for Learning
  • Our job is to create learning, not to record what we find or to process underachievement

The Learning and Teaching Policy sets out clear expectations and entitlements. It identifies the areas and criteria against which we will be evaluated. There should be an on-going discussion about learning and teaching in teams with constant review, reflection and development of policy and practice. Every member of staff is a leader of learning in the school and the Learning and Teaching Policy is used to provide a guide to our work. We pride ourselves on our success, which is the result of every member of staff planning for those we serve with a commitment to providing the very best for all our students.

Reading at Seven Kings

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

Jorge Luis Borges

In its 2018 report on the “The Case for Children’s Rights to Read” the International Literacy Association (ILA) concludes that “At a basic level, reading enables the individual to function. Beyond that, we know that reading enriches the life of that individual personally, socially, and culturally. The ability to read truly represents the difference between inclusion in and exclusion from society.” The ability to read and the opportunity to read with purpose and for pleasure must underpin our curriculum, our approach to pedagogy and the daily experiences of our students.

Throughout our school and our curriculum it is fundamentally important that we commit to fulfilling the aims of the National Curriculum and the DfE’s Reading Framework, not because they are in the framework but because they open doors for our students throughout their lives. These aims include:

  • Word reading and decoding
  • Comprehension (in both reading and listening)
  • Reading for pleasure

Working in a multicultural school, where 84% of our students are bilingual or multilingual and English is often not the first language at home means that we have a cohort of students who are linguistically adept and primed for immersion in a rich reading culture. It is the moral responsibility of every teacher and LSA to ensure that we prioritise reading and communication in the curriculum and in what we teach in our classrooms, continually hone and refine our own reading pedagogies and act in the best interests of every child by creating opportunities, monitoring progress and intervening to close any and all emerging gaps across all abilities. We know that reading must be at the core of our curriculum as it develops in each of us:

  • Concentration
  • Language (vocabulary)
  • Intelligence
  • Creativity
  • Empathy

As such, reading is the key that unlocks all other aspects of the curriculum and will allow our students not just to succeed in our school but to have agency throughout their lives.

Our Libraries and the Learning Environment

  • At the centre of our school’s commitment to reading are our school libraries, book corners and shared reading areas.
  • The success of the library is tightly linked to the quality of reading in the classroom. If teachers collectively model a passion for reading and explicitly support students through thoughtful text selection and skilful teaching the library can become the natural hub for children to further develop their reading.
  • The libraries must be a safe, welcoming and magical place for children

 

Oracy at Seven Kings

Teaching is Listening, Learning is Talking

Deborah Meier

At Seven Kings we provide an environment rich in ‘Talk’. It is important that children are immersed in high-quality ‘Talk’ to fully explore their communication and language skills to equip them for the wider world.

Lessons must include opportunities for children to use and improve their oracy skills.

Our aims for a child’s experience of talk and reading:

  • Talk and reading are seen by all as central to learning the curriculum and developing knowledge and growing, socially, emotionally & academically. Students are taught to be aware of their language and its power, influence and impact and to challenge where talk is negative to another’s development, to ‘watch your language’.
  • The modelling of high-quality talk particularly making sure that we talk with children, not just to them.
  • Explicit approaches to planning and teaching talk and vocabulary development which become increasingly implicit as skills increase.
  • Developing decoding and comprehension must be central in our curriculum to grant all pupils access to learning and life and close gaps.
  • Phonics programme is systematic and with high fidelity and highly responsive to needs (including being proactive in addressing gaps – SEND, EAL, Gaps in learning)
  • Self-regulation increases through a consistent and all-through approach to teaching reading comprehension skills.
  • Consistency of approach is balanced with a need to be responsive, creative and proactive when the approach isn’t working.
  • Metacognition strategies should be used to discuss and unpick the quality of oracy in order to feed-forward effectively.

 

What We are Currently Working on

Our School Improvement Plan

2023 Staff Training Days