Our curriculum mantra is “keep up, not catch up”
At Jamia Islamia Birmingham, we are about helping everyone reach their potential. We have an inclusive culture striving for the very best outcomes for children in our care. We passionately believe that education has the power to open doors and change lives. At the heart of our education is a rich curriculum. We aim to inspire and empower students through our curriculum, which is delivered with consistently good lessons.
Our entire approach is centralised around our core values of:
Adhab I Tolerance I Resilience I Aspiration
The pillars of our curriculum are built around our core values and they dictate our curriculum intent and vision.
Curriculum intent
The KS3 and KS4 curriculum at Jamia Islamia has been developed to teach students the most powerful knowledge in each subject area. The skills and knowledge gained through the academic curriculum which also encourages students to explore community and enterprise is essential to enable our students to be empowered and contribute to society.
We believe that the choices we make about the content we provide and the order we present it are crucially important. They make a big difference to how students are able to develop effective schema, retain and recall knowledge and skills in long-term memory. We actively promote knowledge transference from short term to long-term memory through the use of regular retrieval practice.
We have high expectations of what the students at Jamia Islamia can achieve. To help our students to have successful outcomes, the most powerful substantive and procedural knowledge is carefully selected to ensure that the curriculum is knowledge rich and ambitious. We want to promote life-long learning and provide our students with the cultural capital needed to become excellent global citizens.
In keeping with our inclusion pillar, we believe every student should have access to the same breadth of curriculum. Carefully selected scaffolding is used for all students to reach equally challenging learning goals and have secure skills and knowledge in each subject.
As part of building resilience, we believe all students should be challenged and seek deeper knowledge and understanding. Embedded within the curriculum are opportunities for students to deepen their understanding through the use of the blue box challenge. These activities provide the opportunity for the students to think more extensively or consider different applications of the substantive and disciplinary knowledge they have been introduced to. Assessment opportunities are carefully planned so that they are purposeful and support learning. Information from assessment supports our evaluation of the effectiveness of our curriculum content and implementation. Assessments include low stake knowledge retrieval quizzes, end of composite assessment and GL assessments.
Our curriculum pillars in the classroom:
The Jamia Islamia Lesson
- Knowledge retrieval starter
- The starter activity is usually a low stakes knowledge retrieval quiz based on previous lesson.
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- students to demonstrate learning.
Implementation of the curriculum
Curriculum planning documents
Long term plan: Each department details their high level plan and overarching subject curriculum intent in the long term plan.
Medium Term Plan: The medium term plan detail how blocks of the content are broken down into sequences of learning, using the composite and component structure. The diagram below shows a typical composite and component structure:
The medium term plan outlines precisely and in meticulous detail what the pupils will be learning. It will detail the declarative (‘Students will know that….’) and procedural (‘Students will know how to…’) knowledge.
How will we assess the impact of the curriculum?
Work Scrutiny: To assess
- The impact of student intervention and SEN requirements of students
Learning Walks: To support
- The quality of teaching and learning identifying strengths and development opportunities
- Opportunities for development
Stakeholder’s voice: To listen
- To the opinions of all stakeholders