HSAEL News

What are you trying to achieve?

The HSAEL curriculum aims to enact our mission that every student will be a leader in their chosen field, with many choosing to be leaders of STEM. It is through our well taught, academic curriculum that we will ensure that every student will leave HSAEL with the academic currency to gain entry to elite universities and professional careers.

We offer a rigorous and traditional curriculum, rooted in academia.

The intent of the HSAEL curriculum is to embody our values:

• Encouraging growth – ensuring students receive feedback regularly and building resilience.
• Instilling a sense of responsibility – through independence and making decisions that will improve their own academic experience.
• Promoting ambition – rigorous curriculum that enables students to achieve the highest grades and access to leadership opportunities and elite careers and universities.
• Fostering compassion – placing knowledge in the context of the wider world and creating an understanding of different perspectives.
• Cultivating excellence – creating consistent habits in gaining knowledge and a pursuit of the mastery of every subject.

 How are you going about achieving these aims?

Every department is passionate about their subject and wants to create leaders in their subject areas. With this in mind, when planning the curriculum, Subject Leads begin with an understanding of the knowledge that students will be required to have in order to access the most elite universities in the U.K. regardless of their starting point. It is the greatest honour to have students choose your subject at university level and become a leader in that area.

Departments complete medium-term plans so that every student has access to the exact same rigorous lessons and curriculum.

Our lesson structure ensures students become independent and confident in their own learning. Every lesson is made up of:

• The Read Now: Knowledge in context, with the big idea of the lesson considered; or perhaps a worked example or model, so students know what they need to do to achieve.
• Daily Review – Questions that rely on knowledge recall and prior learning. This will connect their current lesson to previous lessons. This also serves to support embedding knowledge in their long-term memory.
• Exposition – Metacognitive steps which are planned by the teacher, using their expertise to ensure everyone can move on to the deliberate practice.
• Deliberate practice – time spent applying student’s prior knowledge as well as new knowledge form the exposition into their work.

Students are able to show off their learning in Milestone Tasks which occur at least twice per half-term. Feedback is given to students, and they are then able to refine their responses to maximise progress.

What is the impact?

Since September, we have seen a shift in students knowing and remembering more. Throughout classrooms, we can see the focus on knowledge and understanding in every lesson. The sequencing of the curriculum ensures that students are building on their foundations and are gaining the academic currency they need to be leaders in their chosen field. Y11 and Y13 students are reaping the benefits of a rigorous, academic, and well-sequenced curriculum. This is clear in their Autumn Mock Results, which show a marked improvement from previous years’ results in Autumn Mocks. We can’t wait to see what our HSAEL students can achieve!