At Leigh Academy Rainham, we recognise the importance of providing students with a balanced education, one that is both academically rigorous to ensure the best outcomes for all our students but also provides our young people with all the professional and personal attributes required to become forward thinking and empathetic citizens in today’s ever changing world.
Post-16 will be a thriving aspect of the life of Leigh Academy Rainham, led by a dedicated team of staff, all sharing the same determination in supporting and encouraging the young adults in our care to: Dream, Believe and Achieve. We believe that our duty is to help our pupils to become the best versions of themselves that they can be and, in so doing, to ensure that they are ready to enter university, an apprenticeship or employment.
Key Stage 5 at Leigh Academy Rainham is a two-year programme. Applicants to Post-16 are given guidance meetings to help them choose the pathway upon which they will pursue. The three curriculum pathways include an:
- Academic Pathway – A combination of Three IB Diploma courses
- Careers Pathway – International Baccalaureate Career-related Programme (IBCP) – a suite of two IB Diploma courses, one vocational course and a Core Programme of Personal and Professional Skills, Language Development, Service Learning and Reflective Project
- Professional Pathway – A combination of vocational qualifications, such as AAQs
Leigh Academy Rainham aims to ensure that all students gain a wide and extensive knowledge base which combined with co-curricular opportunities to build students’ cultural capital. We have a curriculum that is broad and balanced in which has been carefully designed to ensure that: ‘students feel like they have travelled the world.’ Students will become resilient learners and are well prepared and successful in the next stage of their education or career pathway through the delivery of our unique personal development offering: ‘University and Employment Preparation Programme. Our curriculum is structured in to the 3 Key Stages to achieve these aims in the following way:
- Key Stage 3 (Year 7, 8 and 9): The Middle Years Programme (MYP)
- Key Stage 4 (Year 10 and 11): GCSE and equivalent qualifications
- Key Stage 5 (Year 12 and 13): IB Diploma Courses, The IBCP and AAQs
At Leigh Academy Rainham, our commitment to enabling students to “Dream, Believe and Achieve” extends robustly into our Key Stage 5 (Post-16) provision. The implementation of our curriculum is meticulously designed to ensure that all students engage with a challenging, innovative, and balanced educational experience that prepares them for life after Post-16.
Our KS5 curriculum is implemented with the following core principles at its heart:
- Embedding Knowledge for Long-Term Retention: We employ strategic pedagogical approaches to ensure that curriculum content and skills are not just encountered, but deeply embedded in students’ long-term memory. This is achieved through well-considered, systematic retrieval practice tasks and activities that enable students to form rich and interconnected schemas of knowledge and understanding over time.
- Expert Delivery and Cognitive Support: Our experienced subject specialists utilise direct instruction, clear modelling of concepts and skills, and techniques such as dual coding. This approach helps to reduce cognitive load, effectively share expert knowledge, introduce novel and complex content, and clearly demonstrate successful approaches to learning specific skills relevant to KS5 study.
- High-Quality, Actionable Feedback: We are committed to providing regular, high-quality feedback that astutely addresses misconceptions, identifies and plugs gaps in knowledge, and prompts students to become highly reflective learners. Students are encouraged to actively engage with success criteria to make significant improvements and drive their own progress.
- Fostering Inquiry and Deep Understanding: Astute and adaptive questioning is a cornerstone of our KS5 lessons. Teachers use probing and thought-provoking questions to enhance students’ depth of understanding, stimulate intellectual curiosity, and promote new learning. This encourages students to think critically and engage actively with the subject matter.
Through this dedicated approach to curriculum implementation, Leigh Academy Rainham strives to equip every KS5 student with the knowledge, skills, and attributes necessary to excel in their chosen pathways and confidently take their next steps into successful futures.
The curriculum will make a positive impact on the outcomes of every child. We will know that this is true as we are delivering a high standard of education, quality assured through qualitative and quantitative measures. Leaders at all levels review learning, talk with our students and provide feedback to move practice forward. The impact of the school’s curriculum is measured through several means:
- Outcomes for students across all key stages and groups
- EHCP Objectives
- Progress and attainment data for current year groups
- Destinations data
- Attendance and participation data
- Behaviour logs
- Engagement in enrichment activities
- Stakeholder feedback
- Progress towards the Gatsby benchmarks.
