Our Three I's

Great Park Academy: Science Curriculum Intent 

The intention of the Great Park Academy Science curriculum is to enable our pupils to develop the scientific knowledge and skills to:

i. show respectful positivity towards scientists and the scientific method. 

ii. be resilient and keep trying to understand scientific ideas, even if they are difficult. 

iii. have the aspiration to achieve further scientific qualifications and/or a career in a scientific area. 

iv. appreciate that science is collaborative, involving clear communication, teamwork and inclusion. 

v. seek and value a successful understanding of the workings of our planet and the wider Universe. 

vi. be globally aware citizens who care about the future of our planet and show empathy towards all the living things on Earth. 

Our curriculum is ambitious, striving towards these aims through the careful sequencing of substantive and disciplinary knowledge to allow our pupils to be highly successful in their learning. The ordering of substantive knowledge is linked to our key questions (below) and has been chosen to provide the optimal pathway to a high level of learning and long-term memory. Built upon strong foundations, our curriculum spirals to further strengthen the depth of pupil understanding. Disciplinary knowledge is carefully intertwined throughout the substantive units of learning at relevant points, supporting pupils to develop strong scientific skills. 

At KS3 our intent is to ensure that pupils develop and secure foundational knowledge and skills, ready for success in year 10 and year 11. We want pupils to remember things, apply their knowledge, as well as analyse and evaluate experiments. 

Great Park Academy: Science Curriculum Implementation

School science is split into two broad areas; a number of scientific skills, this is the disciplinary knowledge of science, and a huge body of scientific knowledge, the substantive knowledge of science.

Scientific Skills: Disciplinary Knowledge

Disciplinary knowledge refers to knowledge of the practices of science.  

We start each year with a “Working Scientifically” unit of learning, where pupils review some fundamentals of scientific disciplinary knowledge. Following this, in our high-quality science curriculum, disciplinary knowledge is carefully interweaved and sequenced within substantive units of learning, to reveal the interplay between substantive and disciplinary knowledge. This ensures that pupils not only know ‘the science’; they also know the evidence for it and can use this knowledge to work scientifically. 

We have organised the disciplinary knowledge of the Great Park Academy Science curriculum into the following categories:

Scientific Knowledge: Substantive Knowledge 

Substantive knowledge refers to knowledge of the products of science, such as models, laws and theories. 

Science at Great Park Academy is built around the traditional disciplines of biology, chemistry, and physics. We have developed our “Key Questions” of biology, chemistry, physics, and each unit of learning is linked to at least one of these questions. We have developed this device to support pupils to recognize their learning journey and form elaborately connected neural networks to aid long-term memory of key concepts. According to Ausubel’s subsumption theory, linking new material to previously learned and understood material leads to the most meaningful learning; our aim is to use the key questions to help facilitate the process of meaningful learning. Pupils will create interconnected continents of knowledge, rather than isolated islands. The ordering of substantive knowledge is linked to our key questions (below) and has been chosen to provide the optimal pathway to a high level of learning and long-term memory. Built upon strong foundations, our curriculum spirals to further strengthen the depth of pupil understanding.