In September 2019 the Trust implemented the Knowledge-Rich Curriculum. The curriculum was over 12 months in planning with leaders and teaching staff from across the trust.
Over the Spring Term, the Amethyst Trust moved away from using learning objectives to structure learning sequences, and instead moved to a system of Big Questions and Small Questions. Simply put, the Big Questions stretch over a sequence of lessons and are something that students should be built up to being able to answer; there is a Small Question for each lesson which helps students to have a clear frame of reference for a lesson, and allows both teachers and students to judge how successful the lesson has been more easily.
Starting with the end of the educational journey, departments and teachers worked backwards, redesigning the curriculum pathway that our students would work. First, they agreed on the key knowledge that students would need to have by the end; next, they plotted the best sequence of learning, thinking about the needs of students and not their own convenience; finally, they planned in when students would be asked to revisit this knowledge, considering proven knowledge-rich approaches such as the forgetting curve, interleaved assessment and spaced learning in order to aid retention and consolidation of knowledge in both the short and long terms
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