Search

Letter re. Change in School Day

20th January 2023

Dear parent/carer

At Stepney All Saints School we continually drive to maintain and improve our outstanding curriculum.  At the start of this year the curriculum ‘working party’, a group made up of staff from across the school, began to research and review school curriculums across the country, in particular schools with the same context as ours.  The working party identified a number of key areas to address.

The detail of this review is contained in the attached document, ‘Curriculum Review’.

The Curriculum Working Party group has made three recommendations and I am now writing to you regarding some significant changes. As I said, these are detailed in the attached document and I encourage you to read this.

These changes will take effect from the new school year in September 2023. It is important to note that current Year 10 students will continue with their current courses and will not be affected.

As head teacher of our outstanding school, I take pride from the strong relationship that we have with you our families and always welcome feedback from you. We have created a google form to capture the thoughts of parents on our proposed changes.

https://forms.gle/vMPfQMoN8uto96ND9

Please do not hesitate to get in touch should you have any questions.

Yours sincerely,

Paul Woods

Headteacher

Review of the timings of the school day and allocations to different subject areas at Key Stage 3 and 4

Rationale

We carried out a benchmarking exercise and considered the practices at other high performing schools in the local area and across London. We concluded that:

Outcomes

Our Curriculum Working Party group made three recommendations we strongly believe will benefit our students:

Key Stage 3

At Key Stage 3, the English curriculum time allocation will change as follows:

Year Group Current English Time (minutes) Proposed English Time (minutes)
Year 7 540 660
Year 8 480 550
Year 9 480 550

 

Key Stage 4

At Key Stage 4, the English and Maths curricula time allocation will change as follows:

Year Group Current English Time (minutes) Proposed English Time (minutes) Current Maths Time

(minutes)

 Proposed Maths Time (minutes)
Year 10 480 550 420 550
Year 11 480 550 420 550

 

Options at Key Stage 4

At Key Stage 4, our students will study the following range of GCSEs

Core, mandatory GCSEs EBacc Options Open Options
Humanities Option

 

One from

 Language Option

 

One from

  

 

 

Mandatory

  

 

 

One from
·         English Language

 

·         English Literature

 

·         Mathematics

 

·         Double Award Science (or Triple Science in place of one option)

 ·         History

 

·         Geography

 ·         Bengali

 

·         Spanish

 

·         French

 ·         RE

·         Core PE (no examination)

 ·         Art

·         Business

·         Computing

·         DT

·         Drama

·         Health and Social Care

·         ICT

·         Media Studies

·         Music

·         PE

·         Psychology

·         Sociology

·         Sports Science

This spread of GCSEs is greater than many other schools and reducing the number of Open Options by one will increase the time given to the other four Option subjects by 30 minutes.

Length of school day

To fulfil these recommendations and ensure our students continue to study a broad and rigorous curriculum we will amend the length of the school day. Whilst we will ensure continuity for families in the morning by maintaining a start time of 08.40, the school finish time will change.

Therefore, from September 2023:

This gives our students an additional 50 minutes in school per week.

To summarise:

  1. School will continue to start at 40
  2. From the academic year of September 2023: