Driven by our ethos and values, our curriculum enables students to study the subjects important to them, develop the skills they will need to shape them as citizens ready for a prosperous future in modern Britain or globally.
We have very high expectations for every student, with challenging, aspirational and shared potentials. Students at Handsworth Wood Girls’ Academy are supported academically and emotionally developing skills, attitudes and abilities which will enable them to achieve their life goals.
Our curriculum is sequenced to ensure that students gain knowledge, connect key concepts, acquire new skills and learn how to apply this confidently in different contexts. Our curriculum leaders have carefully considered what knowledge should be secured and how best do we ensure that pupils learn that knowledge in a way that means they remember it and can use it? In 2020-2021 we have become a High Performance Learning (HPL) Pathway school and are at the start of a two year journey of implementing the HPL framework alongside our curriculum content.
The HPL framework underpins the learning culture and educational fabric of the academy. The HPL ethos chimes with our academy values: scholarship- character – community and drives us in our mission to unlock a thirst for learning for all to successfully access an ever-changing world. To overcome barriers and embrace challenges to enrich themselves and our community. We are strongly aligned to the belief that high performance is for the many, not just for the few, as we embark on our journey to be a world class school.
High Performance Learning is a research-based, pedagogy-led philosophy that responds to our growing understanding of human capability. It normalises high performance for all students and uses a unique teaching and learning framework to systematically develop the cognitive skills, values, attitudes and attributes needed for lifetime success. (Deborah Eyre)
Our curriculum approach continues to evolve as we embed the HPL framework of how learners think (Advanced Cognitive Performance) and how learners behave – (Values, Attitudes, Attributes) into our curriculum and culture. We will be building the HPL cognitive competencies into our subject curriculum alongside knowledge and disciplinary skills over the next two years.
The overarching aims of our curriculum is to drive the following outcomes:
- Increasingly strong academic results year-on-year leading to good post school destinations
- Well-motivated and engaged students; school-ready, college-ready, work-ready and life ready