The Cottingham Curriculum Intent 

We are a true comprehensive school with a diverse range of learners. All students at Cottingham High School are entitled to an engaging, broad, balanced, rich, challenging, and ambitious curriculum, with a strong academic core, delivered by specialists who are passionate about their subject. This will include classroom-based learning, independent learning outside the classroom and an exciting and inclusive range of extra-curricular enhancement and enrichment opportunities designed to ignite and inspire our students to shape positive futures.  

Our curriculum clearly sets out the explicit knowledge and skills that pupils will need to succeed, how this knowledge and these skills will be taught and assessed and how effectively pupils apply the knowledge and skills they have acquired. Our aims are to provide a successful education where pupils achieve highly and are equipped with the knowledge and cultural capital, they need to be confident and succeed in life. Our curriculum is designed sequentially so that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before through a mastery approach, ensuring students can retrieve what they have already been taught.  It builds towards clearly defined end points to ensure the best possible progress for our students. 

We have designed our curriculum to reflect our context and to combat social disadvantage by addressing gaps in pupils’ knowledge and skills. This includes an emphasis on reading and vocabulary-rich programmes of study and a focus on careers education in each curriculum area, which will raise aspirations. Carefully considered curriculums aim to reduce social inequality through developing pupils’ cultural knowledge and experiences so all students are confident to interact with others, from all walks of life and open realisations that regardless of social background, social mobility is possible.   

Above all, we want all our students to be enthusiastic about their studies and for them to believe, achieve and succeed so that they can leave our school equipped to create a positive future for themselves.