Curriculum Overview

All students at Ormiston Denes Academy, regardless of their background, have the opportunity to succeed at the highest level. All aspects of our school life inspire students to have aspirations and be ambitious.  

We enhance our student’s life choices and create social justice by ensuring our curriculum is designed for all students to have rigorous academic challenge, whilst enabling all our students to make positive life choices so they are ready, responsible, respectful, kind and proud. 

To ensure this journey is ambitious and right for our context we will continue to research and compare our approach to the best locally, nationally, across the trust and through utilising available educational research. 

To support the delivery of curriculum intention: 

• Planned as a 5 year curriculum journey, our 3-year Key Stage 3 and two year Key Stage 4 is an integral part of our curriculum intentions. 

• Our curriculum is designed to deliver a broad and balanced provision to every student within the Progress 8 and Attainment 8 requirements and has helped to reduce gaps in learning created by two years of interrupted learning. 

• As an academy, we continue to make decisions within the curriculum-led financial planning model set out by OAT, but also balance this with the needs of our students. 

Changes and rationale for September 2025 

1. We will retain a 25 hour teaching week of 5, 60 minute lessons per day. 

2. As literacy and numeracy remains a key focus of the school improvement plan, we will maintain the teaching hours for core subjects, but still offer a broad and balanced curriculum. 

3. We will maintain a continued investment in the literacy/numeracy intervention period in years 7-9 which has been included to ensure this key priority is supported within the curriculum model.  

4. Where possible, utilise further curriculum support available from other OAT academies and national and regional subject leaders. 

5. Across KS3, the technology rotation will cease and lesson will be delivered once a fortnight enabling students to experience a broader range of artist disciplines and ensure greater preparedness for the next phases of education. Subjects in the technology rotation include: Product Design, Art, Catering and it (Computer Science). 

6. We will continue to invest in PSHE as we consider it crucial to their development.  As an academy we continue to believe that education is more than examinations, and this is one crucial area where the view to continue to increase the amount of time allocated for one period a fortnight to one period per week. This time also includes scope for RHSE and RE continuing in KS4. 

7. Physical education is important to lifestyle and it continues to be important to both the physical and mental health of our students after the pandemic. PE will retain their two periods per week from 7-11.   

8. MFL will retain their two periods per week leading to greater uptake at KS4 increasing the proportion of students taking the Ebacc over time whilst it is still a governor priority. 

9. Reflective of OAT guidance and other high performing schools nationally, GCSE Options will move from students taking 4 options to 3 increasing the hours of study from 5 per fortnight to 6 and enabling a deeper understanding leading to improved academic success whilst still offering students a broad, academic offer. 

10. The movement from 4 to 3 options groups has created additional hours in the curriculum model. We have deployed this in the 25/26 academic year to Year 10 English and will carry this forward in the 26/27 academic year to Maths and Science  

Curriculum Development  

1. Departments continually evaluate and review their curriculum provision through a new subject review process, an ongoing SEF cycle and an annual curriculum review cycle in beginning in the spring term. 

2. As an Academy, we are committed to ensuring that all curriculums follow the National Curriculum (where available) as a minimum offer for all our students. 

3. In a growing range of subjects, OAT curriculums models are available. Curriculum Leaders are more adept at utilising whole sequences or elements of these curriculum to support the ODA 5-year curriculum intentions.  

4. Next year, sees the introduction of trust wide Common Assessment. Our core curriculum intentions have been reviewed to support effective use of this data. 

5. As part of the roll out of the OAT Common Assessment, we will review our ODA reporting and assessment policy to ensure that this reflects the new trust wide approach to assessment. 

GCE/BTEC Options 

The annual process of supporting students to select GSCE/BTEC options preferences has now been completed. This year, it is important for governors to know that we have implemented a new curriculum model to support students to complete 3 options rather than 4.  

Students and families have engaged in this process positively, with over 98% of the option passports completed by students and signed by parents. This is a testament to hard work of Oliver Cooper, Careers Leader and Liberty Grimmer (HOY) and Nicola Schroder (Pastoral Manager) who facilitated the option preference process in Spring Term. 

Lesson Allocation for September 2025 

OAT Curriculum Statement

At Ormiston Academies Trust the purpose of the curriculum is based on our purpose as a Trust:

• Teach – the curriculum sets out the knowledge and skills pupils are entitled to.
• Develop – the curriculum sets out how pupils will develop socially and emotionally.
• Change – the curriculum should be designed so that any pupil can excel, so that no one is disadvantaged.

We have developed a curriculum statement and set of principles in collaboration with our schools, to ensure it meets the needs and requirements of our teachers and students. Our view of the curriculum is that:

• It extends between the ages of 2 and 19.
• It includes both the formal timetabled curriculum and all the informal learning and development that occurs outside the timetable.
• It is a plan or strategy for progression for our pupils: how we move them from a state where they have not acquired specific knowledge, skills, experience and dispositions, to a state where they have acquired these.
• It encompasses everything that pupils acquire: what they know, what they can do, what experiences they have had and how they are likely to behave.
• It involves a deliberate choice to select, from all the possible knowledge, skills, experiences and dispositions, those which we believe students should acquire.
• It responds to well-designed assessment which tells us whether students have acquired what was intended.

Download the OAT Curriculum Statement below:

Curriculum reform

In July 2024, the government launched a review of curriculum and assessment. For further information, please click here.  

• Click here for grade descriptors for GCSEs graded 9-1
• Click here for a three-minute video explaining Progress 8