Catch22 Include London is a registered OCR Edexcel, GCSE and a City & Guilds accredited provider.
To embody our vision, we intend to give young people a broad and rich curriculum that gives them both the academic skills and qualifications needed to move successfully to the next stage of their lives, and the personal development skills to ensure a fulfilling future. We have set a curriculum and a school structure to support our young people with their unique needs and to overcome their barriers to learning.
Our Curriculum Overview
Our curriculum is designed to support our pupils to grow in confidence through rapid improvements in their academic capacity, harness a curiosity and love of learning. The focus on social skills, personal development and addressing of complex needs ensures pupils have the skills and capacity to transition successfully.
All our young people experience a curriculum which is underpinned by values covered by SMSC, PSHE and British Values, ensuring a rounded understanding of themselves and the world around them. Moving forward we are working to become Rights Respecting Schools reflecting our desire for pupils to thrive as individuals and as members of their school and wider communities. We have high aspirations for our young people, and intend for them to leave us prepared for life in modern Britain.
All our students have access to:
We also use group work, one-to-one sessions and mentoring as a part of the curriculum. For all exams, we provide access arrangements for all our students. We plan to add more vocational subjects once students numbers increase. We are also looking at the Sports Leadership Awards.
We strive to identify any blocks to learning and to deliver a curriculum that appeals to all learning styles. Students are encouraged to reflect on how they learn best and why in the past they have struggled in mainstream education.
Where possible, we deliver cross-curricular project based work. All of the work we do, both academic and therapeutic, is person-centred and designed to engage. We are effectively using a primary school delivery model in a secondary setting.
We work with CAMHS, YOS, Social Services and the range other services to meet students’ needs and this target audience to generate and support referrals.
Our learners also have access to fortnightly sessions with a Connexions personal adviser to focus on the next steps to college or employment.
For further information, please click on our Curriculum Overview below.
Read more in our Curriculum Policy.
Literacy across the Curriculum
It has long been recognised that learning is not compartmental, and students learn best where consistent messages and expectations are found across the board. It is also noted that our students in particular are often weaker in their basic literacy and numeracy skills. We ensure our students are practicing these key skills in all areas of education in order for them to become habits.
To this end, English teachers across Education came together to agree an approach to raising standards of literacy and has 4 key parts to it:
1. Training and re-thinking our approach - an example might be in food, writing up a recipe. Instead of focusing the teaching on writing down the steps taken, there could be a teaching moment to talk about using imperative verbs to write recipes. What does this mean? Why do recipes use them? How do we write them? Before setting them off
2. Focused improvements - an example might be reading. During a reading focus half term, the focus might be reading new words. Having a slide with new vocabulary on it, instead of just telling them the word and the meaning, we can focus on breaking down the work to say it, and to decipher the meaning so instead of telling them photosynthesis means…. Encourage students to make connections with ‘photo’ and ‘synthesis’ as a teaching point.
3. Word of the Week - in order to improve the vocabulary of our students, we will have a word of the week. It will be a word in common usage which they may or may not use or know. They are not designed to be weird words, but words we want them to add to their daily use.
4. Marking Stickers - marking stickers are custom printed literacy stickers. All teachers, once a week will add a literacy sticker to a student’s piece of work. They should then respond to this focus on literacy. The stickers contain a range of statements on them and are designed to stand out and be obvious when books are looked at, so students will find them easily.
This approach has been implemented in our school and across all Include schools.
Contact Details
If you want to learn more about our curriculum please contact:
Tiya Gilbert (Head of Curriculum) - tiya.gilbert@catch-22.org.uk