The programme is coherently organised and sequenced across all the statutory themes. - External Evaluation 2024

CARE Curriculum Intent

At Co-op Academy Belle Vue, our CARE curriculum aims to provide our students with the powerful knowledge, skills, and qualities they need to unlock their potential, enabling them to be physically healthy and mentally well citizens of modern Britain who actively contribute to society and know how to keep themselves and others safe. Our CARE curriculum is ambitious, broad, and balanced. It includes expert teaching on all elements of personal development within the academy, covering all relevant guidance from the Department for Education, supporting our culture of academic excellence and character development for all. At Co-op Academy Belle Vue we define strong character as the good decisions we make, even when no one is watching. We further codify this as our CARE principles: Community, Cooperation, Ambition, Achievement, Responsibility, Respect, Endeavour, and Enjoyment. Through these principles, we teach all students the importance of making the right decisions at the right times for the right reasons.

The CARE curriculum at Co-op Academy Belle Vue aims to:

• Form a spiral curriculum structured around three key strands: Physical Health and Mental Wellbeing, Living in the Wider World, Relationships

• Place safeguarding at its heart, supported through core concepts, including the fundamental British values and equality, diversity, and inclusion. 

• Build in complexity over time whilst remain age-appropriate. At each level, the curriculum is interleaved and explicitly links to prior and future learning, building a deep conceptual understanding of the powerful knowledge by maximising the potential of memory and retention. Beyond the statutory content, we prioritise content that will have the most positive impact on our specific community based on community voice. Living in the wider world includes part of our offer for careers education, information, advice and guidance, ensuring students are provided with up to date information about all future pathways available to them. 

• Be fundamentally guided by our academy CARE principles and create the conditions for our students to reflect on and clarify their own personal values, considering fundamental British values and those of the Co-op Academies Trust. Through careful sequencing of complex and conflicting points of view, our community conversations offer an opportunity to debate in a safe environment with clear ground rules linking to our principles of community and respect. 

• Support all students to unlock their potential, regardless of academic, societal, or economic starting point, to take their ambitious next steps in life with the powerful knowledge, support, and guidance needed for success.

• Develop the literacy and reading of our students through our text-rich CARE curriculum to further prepare them for life in modern Britain. 

CARE Curriculum Implementation

PSHE (Personal, social, health and economic education), RSHE (Relationships, sex and health education), CEIAG (Careers Education, Information, Advice and Guidance) and Citizenship are all taught primarily within the CARE Curriculum at Co-op Academy Belle Vue. There is curriculum coverage of these areas in other subject disciplines in the academy as well as through regular community ambition time. The academy also offers a comprehensive wider programme of opportunities to complement the CARE curriculum and support the personal development of all students. 

At Co-op Academy Belle Vue we value the personal development of all students. We ensure parity for CARE Curriculum with other subjects by providing one hour curriculum time per week for all students to allow for sufficient coverage of powerful knowledge, opportunities for discussion and questions. 

All CARE curriculum lessons are delivered using booklets that are created using accredited resource banks and are regularly reviewed and updated to ensure they are age appropriate and effectively serve the specific community of Belle Vue and its surrounding areas. 

We take our CARE curriculum lessons as another opportunity to develop the literacy skills of our students through expert teaching of reading. In all lessons, students engage with challenging texts about complex issues, this is designed to increase both the academic rigour as well as the intrinsic value of CARE curriculum lessons. Literacy skills are fundamental skills for success and safety in the modern world.  

Student knowledge is assessed using baseline tasks and progress reflections in each lesson and cumulatively through our knowledge expert assessments within the academy in the same way as all other subject areas. 

Community voice is regularly used to impact the curriculum including student voice, family voice, family forum events, staff voice and intelligence from the local community including the police. 

Find out more information on the RSE elements of the care curriculum here.