Our Curriculum 

The Federation of Holy Trinity Church of England Schools is set over two sites. Our schools are located on the outskirts of the cathedral city of Ripon. Ripon is a cathedral city steeped in history and home to magnificent historical buildings and long-observed traditions. The city is proud of its ecclesiastical heritage, which is entwined with the church, both due to the cathedral in the city centre and its proximity to the nearby Fountains Abbey. Ripon has a rich military history; many pupils who attend the school are from military families. The Federation is representative of the emerging diversity within the city. Across the schools we have twenty-three different languages represented in our school.  Every child is recognised as a unique individual at Holy Trinity. We celebrate and welcome the differences within our school community.

Intent

At Holy Trinity, we have designed and implemented an aspirational curriculum that is both immersive and progressive. We use a carefully planned model, with both breadth and depth, that is highly relevant and purposeful, and that truly broadens pupils’ outlook and views by promoting global perspectives. Our intent is to raise standards across all subjects, to enable our pupils to access and engage with their learning to ensure both academic and personal success.

We constantly provide enhancement opportunities to engage learning and believe that childhood should be a happy, investigative and enquiring time in our lives where there are no limits to curiosity and there is a thirst for new experiences and knowledge. We promote positive attitudes to learning, which reflect the values and skills needed to promote responsibility for learning and future success.

We aim to offer hands-on, cohesive and challenging learning, highlighting human creativity and achievement. We strive to help our pupils realise the full potential they have to achieve and succeed, not just at school, but as educated citizens within their own community and on a wider global scale. We want the pupils’ learning to be more ‘outward-facing’, enabling them to become well-rounded and happy individuals who, not only care about themselves, but about others and the environment.

We want to provide all learners with a curriculum with both breadth and depth, that is highly relevant and purposeful, exciting for both staff and pupils, and that is aligned to our unique locality and all it has to offer. Our curriculum offers a wide range of inspiring, engaging and exploratory learning experiences, that includes developing cultural capital through planned activities, such as residential trips. Providing pupils with opportunities for learning which lead to maximum growth and development is a key priority, including designing and implementing a curriculum that is best suited to their specific needs.

We aim to raise pupils’ aspirations by teaching them about human creativity and achievement and we strive to help our pupils understand the impact we have on the world we live in, not just at school, but as educated citizens, not just within their own community but on a wider global scale.

Rationale for Implementation

We use Dimensions ‘Learning Means the World’ Curriculum as the main vehicle for achieving our outlined intent, with a view to providing an ambitious, highly visible curriculum offer in  art & design, computing, dance, design technology, geography, history, music and PSHE. The core curriculum subjects of English and Maths as well as foundation subject of PE, MFL and RE follow specific programmes. This information is detailed on their individual subject pages. 

This curriculum is underpinned by four highly relevant world issues, known as the four Cs:-

• Culture
• Communication
• Conflict
• Conservation

Communication

As a Federation, we have noticed a deterioration in early language skills, due in part to covid restrictions, and the negative impact that this has had on child’s communication skills has the have moved up through school.  As such, we have identified developing excellent communication skills as a priority for equipping our pupils for the future. Our curriculum provides a wealth of opportunities for pupils to develop their language and vocabulary, helping them to articulate their learning, express their thinking and opinions clearly in discussion, debate and presentation, as well as enabling collaboration and exchange of ideas. We want our pupils to use a wide range of communication tools as a means of increasing confidence, developing self-regulation and nurturing their critical thinking skills.

Culture

As a school with a changing demographic, we have identified the need to teach our pupils to fully appreciate and embrace cultural diversity, learning about and experiencing a range of different cultural and faith heritages found in wider society. As a church school our vision and its associated values are grounded in a clear theology firmly rooted in a Christian narrative. We created our vision from the theological roots taken from 1 John 4:11-12 alongside our deeply rooted belief that we are ‘Loved by God and one another.’  These biblical roots are woven throughout our curriculum.

We want our pupils to value diversity, understand the roots and importance of cultural heritage and to behave in a respectful and tolerant way towards others, regardless of faith, ethnicity or background. We actively and explicitly promote cross-cultural friendship, respect, tolerance and understanding through ‘Learning Means the World’.

Conflict

As a school we are situated with in a city proud of its a rich military history and hence, conflict plays a big part of the families represented in school. Remembrance commemoration is a big part of our city’s tradition, and we feel it is important that our children play an active role in this. We believe that life skills should be taught throughout the curriculum and an understanding of responsible, respectful behaviour is an important aspect of learning. Having a developed understanding of sources of conflict and recognising the impact that conflict can have on relationships at a personal, local, national and international scale, we believe, will make a difference to their own choices. We want our pupils to be able to independently manage conflict, whenever it may arise, in a constructive, timely manner. Through this curriculum we believe we can provide our pupils with strategies to deal with conflict issues in a positive way.

Conservation

We want our pupils to fully appreciate and benefit from all that the local area has to offer. We feel they will do this best through a curriculum that puts sustainability at the heart of the curriculum, employing a more structured approach to developing environmental awareness and appreciation, not just at local, but also national and global levels.

 

Our curriculum narrative begins with Communication, as this underpins and links to the other three focus areas. We have followed this with, Conflict which affects the present as well as having a focus on the past, specifically learning from mistakes. Our next theme is Conservation which looks to the future and a better, sustainable world. And finally, our theme is Culture because we believe that understanding diversity and identity is essential for our pupils to fully embrace society.

We also encourage our pupils to have high aspirations by teaching them about human creativity and achievement through additional Competency Units about famous figures that focus on Creativity, Commitment, Courage and Community.