Key Stage 4 Curriculum Intention

Students experience a wide range of new topics and skills at KS4 whilst following the AQA Trilogy or Triple science specifications. Each topic strand is linked intrinsically to prior knowledge and skills from KS3 and builds in terms of complexity, skills and application. Our aim is that all students should leave UTC being able to understand and explain the scientific world around them and more importantly are equipped with the skills to problem solve and critically evaluate the ‘big’ moral questions.  

To support this, the design of Knowledge Organisers (KOs) has been carefully planned and aligned to the curriculum narrative. KOs are carefully embedded into the curriculum structure to ensure that this meets the need for improving literacy and provides opportunities for retrieval practice. This also ensures that new key language is introduced, explained and modelled when building on prior learning within each strand. Assessment of students’ understanding of the curriculum is constant and low stake. This is done through multiple-choice checkpoints and demonstrate tasks. The aim of this assessment is to feed directly into planning so that lessons are personalised to meet the needs of all students.  

For triple science there are 2 exam papers for each science. Each exam will be 1 hour 45 minutes in duration and will represent 50% of the final grade for that subject. For combined science there are still 2 papers for each science, but these are 1 hour 15 minutes in duration and account for 1/6 of your total combined grade.