We spoke to Ian McNeilly, CEO of The de Ferrers Trust. It's a 7-school trust, though we focus below on how it has approached the curriculum across its 3 secondary schools.
What's the approach?
This trust aligns:
- Curriculum time for each subject area across Key Stage 3 and KS4 (see an example of the time breakdown here). This includes:
- A strong focus on the arts in KS3
- A 'values' curriculum area to make sure there's enough weekly time for PSHE and RE
- Flexibility for pupils who need extra literacy and numeracy lessons
- Subject content:
- There's 3 common assessment points across the year - certain subject content needs to be taught by each assessment point
- Teachers have autonomy over how they teach the required subject content (there's no demands for identical lesson sequencing or lesson plans)
- Exam boards. This isn't fully standardised across all subjects, but there's around 95% standardised exam boards for each subject across the trust
Vision: the trust's 'moral purpose' is to provide a broad
