The REC has reading for purpose at its very core. Each unit of work has a high-quality, age appropriate driving text assigned. These texts engage, inspire and deepen understanding. Supplementary texts and knowledge organisers support pupils to enrich their knowledge, vocabulary and curriculum skills. Every curriculum session begins with reading for purpose, from either the driving book or a supplementary text. Pupils use this to discuss new knowledge, deepen their enquiry skills and form links in their learning, making use of their oracy skills. Oracy is key to our work in our academy as pupils develop effective communication skills with increasing skill and confidence.

The long-term plan is devised so that there are clear subject links within a unit, enabling pupils to make connections in their learning. This is also the case with the subject strands: skills within these correlate with other subjects, for example the skills within similarities and differences in history work parallel with making comparisons in geography.  Curriculum units are also placed before background knowledge is required for the reading strategy texts. This ensures that pupils have a further opportunity to demonstrate knowledge in a different context, build schema and reinforce retention of facts.

All learning is mastery of skills, which are progressive through the year, a phase and key stage. For the Reading Enhanced Curriculum these are entitled take-aways and relate to different strands of each subject. Reinforcing our strong belief in fostering enquiry, all units have an overarching question as its title and each session has a threaded question: all of which are used to assess pupil progress.

Influential people are also paramount to the curriculum, and are used in all subjects. These are selected to span different eras and link directly to the unit of work pupils are learning. By incorporating a range of people (e.g. historians, scientists, entrepreneurs), new learning is put into a real-world context, developments within a subject historically are seen and pupils are given an insight into how their learning impacts on the world around them and aspires them for future careers.

Please click on the subject links in the drop down menu above to see how we implement our REC throughout the school.