Like everyone in England, I have spent this academic year revamping our department Curriculum Map and Learning Journey to reflect the demands of the new GCSE. I viewed the whole process as an opportunity to revise not only our curriculum for KS4 but also for KS3, while we redesigned new and more up-to-date teaching and learning resources for our Y10 students.
At Princes Risborough School, we follow AQA. I do not like relying on textbooks for the delivery of lessons, but as this was a new syllabus, we decided to choose a textbook, which we could use to mainly, for reading and listening purposes. We went for the Pearson's textbook for AQA.
Next step was to design our new curriculum for KS4 without depending on the structure of a given textbook, neither on the order of themes as per the AQA syllabus. In order to decide our curriculum map, it was important to think about our own school’s context, the depth of topics covered at KS3 so that we could determine a sequence of topics that would best suit our students, not the textbook or the AQA syllabus. This sequence may well be very different for another school.
The Sequence
In our case we decided to teach:
Term 1: Technology and Free Time + Assessment 1
Term 2: Celebrities and Holidays/Tourism
Term 3: Family/Relationships + big input on the oral exam and End of Year Exam
It is worth mentioning that we started teaching the GCSE course after May half term when our Y10 students were still in Y9, as students at Insignis Academy Trust, get a new timetable and start their GCSE choice subjects in the last 6/7 weeks of the Summer term.
During these 6/7 weeks, we covered the topic of Festivals with a big emphasis on La Tomatina as our star festival.
Why this sequence?
As I mentioned the topics were driven by our school context and our KS3 Curriculum Map, to ensure progression. In Y9 students had been studying, mainly, the topics of Holidays and Tourism, so we felt that it would be great to start Y10 with something completely new to move away from fatigue.
Throughout KS3, all topics covered, referred to talking about myself, so we thought it would be nice to start the GCSE course in Y9, following the pattern of holidays but in relation to a festival that students attended or would like to attend and which would require them to describe what people normally do there, moving away from "myself" and focussing on third persons: People tend to....
Following the pattern of talking about myself but starting to describe what others do, starting Y10 with the topic of technology was a good choice: it needed substantial new vocabulary while still being loyal to our 5 Magic Powers of key structures and will allow students to talk about themselves but also about third persons: technology can.... technology could...
The topic Free time really followed the path led by Technology, but it would require going back to talking about myself, the topic was also extensively covered in Y8, so we could start getting pace.
After talking and understanding information about hobbies, learning about Celebrities made sense: a topic which, again, allowed us to move away from the myself realm and focus on another people achievements: the celebrities in different tenses.
Finally, after Celebrities, it made sense to go back to Holidays and Tourism and revisit all the vocab/structures learned during Y9; to finish Y10 with the topic of Family, revising key vocab learned in Y7, and take such vocab to a new dimension, as students could use previous vocab in new contexts, to express a special occasion celebrated as a family, or activities they do together as a family, or what their family members had achieved, revisiting the vocab of Celebrities in a new context.
I believe this Curriculum Map has worked for us.
We have created two documents to go with the curriculum map:
A vocab/sentence builder booklet for students:
An oral booklet based on the sample material published by AQA.
GCSE Oral Booklet
To access SoWs and curriculum maps for the new GCSE, click here
To access all our Teaching and Learning slides, following the sentence builders in the booklet and our SoW, click here.
I created a Teaching & Learning Sequence for each topic, comprising around 50/60 slides per topic, with Listening, Reading and Oral material incorporated in the sequence. Writing tasks and materials created for our independent, listening lessons, once every two weeks, are not in the sequence.
Curriculum Maps will change from school to school as they take into account the progression from KS3, the school context and the need to revisit vocabulary in different contexts.
What is your curriculum map for KS4? Why have you chosen to teach a specific sequence of topics in a particular order?