Curriculum Vision

Everything we achieve together at Kenwood Academy is because of our passionate commitment and dedication to excellence for everyone. We are a safe, caring, creative and inspirational learning community in which children, families, friends and staff can unlock their full potential and thrive: a special place where everyone feels they belong, everyone has a voice and every student truly matters as an amazing young person with incredible potential. 

Curriculum Intent

Our personalised, holistic and innovative curriculum empowers every child and young person with the knowledge, confidence, resilience, wonder and life-long habits for learning through wide-ranging, authentic and contextual learning experiences to secure their future success and happiness. 

Their lives are transformed through the rich tapestry of the school, nurturing their social, emotional, mental and physical health and encouraging their unique identity. All Kenwood Academy children and young people will be exceptionally well-prepared for adulthood - equipped with the knowledge, skills, behaviours, relationships, cultural capital and outcomes to realise their dreams and ambitions. They will secure their place, their employability and their prosperity as active citizens in their local, national and global communities. 

Our expanding Kenwood Academy curriculum is aligned with the national curriculum. It is fundamentally broad, balanced and inclusive and provides equality of opportunity for everyone, ensuring future success for all our children and young people as they progress into adult life and into future education, employment or training. Further exceptional personalisation ensures a meticulous focus for each child and young person’s next steps and how to get them there through bespoke and responsive provision. 

Our curriculum is inspired by the best that has been thought of, imagined, created, written and spoken and is illuminated through a combination of interactions with high-quality texts, media and real-world experiences. 

Our children and young people encounter a significant amount of sustained reading throughout their time at Kenwood Academy, which enables them to develop reading fluency and to access the full breadth and depth of the curriculum. Prof. E.D. Hirsch writes, ‘to grasp the words on a page we have to know a lot of information that isn’t set down on a page.’ As such, the curriculum aims to equip children and young people with the pre-requisite knowledge to productively grapple, persevere, and ultimately experience reading success and future enjoyment of reading. 

Learning is planned through a regenerative and spiral approach that builds on the strengths of what young people know and can do as they progress through the curriculum. This approach both addresses gaps in prior learning and development and also activates prior knowledge. Essentially, it allows our children and young people to more strategically cohere a sense of meaning, make connections and more effectively transfer and commit knowledge to their long-term memory. 

Skillfully, teachers provide opportunities for children and young people to retrieve accumulated knowledge through low stakes assessments that allow them to progressively build up their fluency in recall and application in increasingly new, unfamiliar and interconnected contexts. To this end, there is a strong focus for children and young people to develop their metacognition, self-regulation and independence. Ultimately, this better enables them to understand how what they have learnt through the curriculum fits in the world and how they can use it to unlock their potential.