Subject specialism is at the heart of our curriculum and the curriculum is deliberately planned and sequenced to enable students to develop subject expertise progressively over time. Subject specialist teams at Salford City Academy collaborate regularly to ensure that the curriculum is implemented effectively to enable all students to make excellent progress.
Further subject specialism is provided by United Learning’s subject advisers. These advisers are subject experts who help teachers link the subject discipline to our pupils’ daily experience in the classroom. Subject advisers meet regularly with Heads of Department and provide expert curriculum guidance and resources to support the implementation of the subject curriculum.
At Salford City Academy, teaching is guided by both Barak Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’ and the Teach Like a Champion (TLAC) techniques. These both provide us with a shared understanding of the characteristics of effective teaching. Rosenshine’s principles, including retrieval practice, effective explanations and modelling, practice and effective feedback, underpin everything that occurs in our classrooms and, in particular, our lesson structure.
Teachers utilise a range of TLAC techniques to ensure that teaching is conducive to long-term retention of knowledge and compliant with Rosenshine’s research-informed principles. This includes, for example, ‘no opt out’ and ‘cold calling’ to ensure that all students have to think when every single question is posed by the teacher.
Our approach to teaching and learning therefore ensures that that lessons build on prior learning and provide sufficient opportunity for independent practice. Our lessons follow a consistent instructional approach, involving:
Retrieval Practice: Students routinely have to recall prior learning to strengthen their ability to remember and recall this knowledge.
Teach: Expert instruction and modelling from specialist teachers, providing students with the core content.
Check: Teachers employ a range of strategies to check that students have understood the core content and address misconceptions rapidly when they are identified. This ensures that teaching is responsive.
Practice: Students engage in independent practice and complete a substantial piece of challenging work that is a product of their own thinking. This phase of the lesson is crucial as students grapple with the core content and will engage in healthy struggle. Memory is the residue of thought meaning that students are far more likely to remember that which they have had to think hard about.
We are particularly conscious of the role that literacy and vocabulary play in underpinning the entire curriculum. Therefore, our teachers explicitly teach the meaning of subject-specific terminology, and we expect lessons across the entire curriculum to contain challenging reading and writing. In Key Stage 3, students also receive a fortnightly Reading to Learn lesson, which explicitly teaches students effective reading strategies.
To allow the mastery approach to be effective (i.e. children learn what they are expected to in the year they are expected to), early catch-up is essential: we aim to promptly identify and support pupils who start secondary school without a secure grasp of reading, writing and mathematics so that they can access the full curriculum. This is done through curriculum adaptations and bespoke interventions in both Literacy and Numeracy which are designed to close gaps and ensure that students are able to access the full curriculum entitlement.