NUAST INSET day 4th December 2019

NUAST will be closed to pupils on Wednesday 4th December due to an INSET day. (Whole School - 05/11/2019)

The Department of Education and Ofsted have set out a new agenda for schools under the umbrella title of the ‘Knowledge Led Curriculum’. This agenda is now ‘live’ and it is the framework by which all schools will be inspected and judged.

From an educational viewpoint, it is broadly welcomed because judgements about schools will be primarily shaped by the ‘quality of education’ inspectors see in classrooms, rather than through the narrow prism of educational outputs such as Key Stage 2 results, GCSE results, etc.

A key ingredient of this new approach is that schools ‘own’ their curriculum and develop an aspiration for the content of the curriculum beyond that which is set out by the various subject ‘National Curriculum’ statements. Equally, the new curriculum expectation is for schools to provide a broad and balanced curriculum that will enable our young learners to enjoy a wider range of learning experiences, than just those linked to preparing them for key assessments.

This significant change requires every school and classroom teacher to re-engineer their approach to the education they provide for their learners. This is both exciting and challenging. In order to secure this new agenda, the Nova Education Trust, and its associated schools, have set out an ambitious programme of staff development in order to ensure we deliver education to the highest of standards within this new framework. This agenda will require significant training inputs over the next few years.

As a key starting point to delivering the necessary training for the ‘Knowledge Led Curriculum’ agenda, the Nova Education Trust Directors have granted an additional training day on: Wednesday 4th December 2019. This means that our school will be closed to children on the above date. We hope this early notice will enable families to more easily make alternative arrangements for child care and supervision.