Curriculum

As a Dixons academy, our curriculum is aligned to a common set of trust-wide principles which are underpinned by our mission to challenge educational and social disadvantage in the North. We believe all students are entitled to an ambitious, knowledge-rich curriculum which will open doors and maximise life chances.

At Dixons Pennine Academy, we challenge social inequality by instilling shared powerful knowledge through an academic curriculum which is broad and balanced. Each subject specifies, in detail, the knowledge (both substantive and procedural) students will remember, underpinned by the National Curriculum and wider subject domains. As such, in each discipline, students are prepared for national assessments, and importantly, acquire knowledge from all cultural domains that builds wider cultural capital.

Our curriculum is informed by the latest evidential research from cognitive science about memory, forgetting and practice in order to help students remember more, and apply, the best of what has been thought and said. By employing our curriculum as progression model, we make knowledge stick so that it can be flexibly applied in a variety of different contexts and situations.

Running alongside our subject specialist curriculum are our Morning Meetings. Our students in Year 7 to 11 start each morning with Morning Meeting that supports our students’ vocabulary, metacognition, and acquisition of powerful knowledge. Morning Meeting follows a similar format across every year group. Morning Meetings have a specific focus on knowledge acquisition through retrieval practice as we believe that knowledge is the foundation for learning.

At Dixons Pennine Academy, we teach our students powerful knowledge so that they can understand and interpret the world and to think in new and unexpected ways. With the democratisation of knowledge, our students will be incredibly successful in high stakes examinations and will go on to use this understanding to achieve great things in the world.

Please note that parents have a right to withdraw their child from part or all of religious education (RE) and parents have the right to request withdrawal of their child from sex education (but not from relationships or health education, nor from statutory science). 

Please contact the academy should you wish to discuss this or if you wish to find out more information about the curriculum for any of our subjects.

Our curriculum intent

• To provide every student, irrespective of their starting point, a fully inclusive, broad, balanced and ambitious curriculum that will enable them to continue their learning journey post 16 and onwards.

• To offer a dynamic and diverse curriculum that is relevant, enjoyable and challenging so that our students develop confidence, resilience and creativity.

• To employ innovative approaches to learning and teaching, at the same time as personalising the learning experience for all students, so that lessons are engaging, relevant and highly educational.  

• To ensure that every individual will be cared for, supported and challenged to maximise their potential in order to create a feeling of self-worth and ambition.  

• To deliver the values led curriculum to develop students’ character, confidence, resilience and independence so that they continue to be successful leaders and positive role models in their community.

We teach a broad and balanced curriculum across a five-year learning journey to fully prepare our students for not only success at Dixons Pennine Academy but for further study and the working world. The curriculum is broad, balanced and includes a range of vocational options at Key Stage 4 to meet the needs of all students as well as providing Key Stage 3 content that is as ambitious as the National Curriculum. Our destinations figure for 2020 was 99.3%, which was above the national figure.