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Social Curriculum
Our Social Curriculum is built upon two distinct but linked approaches - the teaching and ongoing insistence on a set of non-negotiable Social Routines, and the development over 5 years of a suite of Habits for Success.
For further detail for each academic year for all subjects please see our Curriculum Content page
The school’s Social Routines are carefully scripted procedures that we expect everybody (staff and student) to adopt in different scenarios throughout the entirety of the school day. They represent our behavioural norms, and their use prevents antisocial behaviours occurring, or lesson time being used unproductively.
The Social Routines are carefully taught, and frequently re-taught when necessary.
The school has developed a detailed Habits for Success model and each of our CALM, CREATIVE, ENGAGED and RESPECTFUL habits has been built around three levels of sophistication. Our essential habits, transitional habits and post-16 habits.
Following Ravenscroft and Baker (2020) we have identified three areas of a person’s attributes that could conceivably be developed through a well-considered social curriculum:
Knowledge: ideas about the self, school, society that can be recalled, understood and explained
Character attributes: the choices an individual makes, based on their adopted values. Character attributes are manifested as attitudes and behaviours
Skills: the ability to, “enact a repeatable process”. Skills can be usefully subclassified to include-
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Social skills (the skills we use everyday to interact and communicate with others. They include verbal and non-verbal communication, such as speech, gesture, facial expression and body language)
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Essential skills (highly transferrable skills that almost everyone needs to perform in any job or academic environment)
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Basic skills (literacy, oracy, numeracy, basic digital skills)
In summary then, through our Social Curriculum our learners are:
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Trained in the social habits that we consider to be most likely to enhance their future
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Carefully taught socially-valuable as well as culturally valuable knowledge and paradigms
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Are taught (and re-taught) about aspects of character that are ‘decent’
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Attitudes and behaviours are moulded through strategic use of the school’s rewards and behaviour systems.
From habits to competencies…
Our ultimate aim of our work on a Social Curriculum is to ensure that our learners acquire social ‘competences’. A competence is best seen as the automatic application of a knowledge and skills-set to a given, live situation. Our aim then is to bestow not just a range of skills in our learners, but also the ability to readily apply them when appropriate- our learners acquire competencies in those developed skill areas.
Over their time with us, in addition to achieving useful academic qualifications we want all of our learners to acquire a broad repertoire of automatic, socially successful behaviours to allow them to ‘do well’ in a wide variety of personal and professional scenarios.