Principal’s Welcome
Welcome to Queen Katharine Academy
As Principal, I am extremely proud of the many things that combine to make Queen Katharine Academy such a special place.
Our motto; ‘working hard; ready for anything’ embodies our mission ‘to do whatever it takes to ensure every student achieves their full potential and develops a love of learning.’
Our vision is to provide an education that ensures that our students leave us with the tools, experiences, values, knowledge and skills to reach their potential: successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors, responsible citizens.
I trained as an English teacher in London in 1996 and nearly thirty years later, I still passionately believe that a good education transforms lives. At Queen Katharine we want every child to grow a love of learning and to develop their independence as learners. We want them to be empowered to be in charge of their own lives, to be fully engaged in their futures and motivated to shape society and the world around them.
Queen Katharine is a dynamic yet disciplined place to learn. We expect every school day to start positively for every child, and we work tirelessly to ensure all our students are Ready for School and Ready to Learn. All our staff start every day on duty across the school to offer a warm welcome to all our learners as they arrive at the academy. We aim to have the highest expectations of all our learners, and we actively look to foster their ambitions.
We expect all our students to develop a positive mindset, and to be Ready to Succeed throughout their time at QKA.
When a child joins our school in Year 7, we have every expectation that they are beginning an exciting, life changing 7-year journey with us.
We are an inclusive, truly comprehensive school which accepts every type of student and tries to get the very best out of them, whatever their ability or personal circumstances. This philosophy is at the heart of everything we do at Queen Katharine Academy. Nowhere is this inclusivity more evident than in our enormously popular sixth form where over 350 students access a truly world class range of courses.
To ensure all our students can complete that journey, our curriculum is innovative and flexible, meeting the needs of the individual student. Throughout their time at QKA, students are provided with an impressive range of subject choices.
Our facilities are superb, designed within an intelligent and accessible layout. We have extensive IT and science facilities, large playing fields and many purpose-built facilities, including specialist dance and theatre suites.
We want our staff to be true teaching experts, and we have embarked on the Education Endowment Foundation’s highly effective Embedding Formative Assessment programme, where all our teaching staff, and our teaching assistants, work together in 10 mixed profile learning groups to improve. These are led by our Teaching and Learning Champions, who themselves are part of a pilot group of over ten teachers studying on the NPQLT programme taking place at Queen Katharine.
Ultimately, what makes Queen Katharine special is not the buildings or facilities but the people; the adults who put the students above anything else, and the children themselves, who come from a diverse and dynamic local community and who put their trust in us to provide them with the opportunities and experiences they will need to flourish and succeed.
I would encourage anyone interested in finding out more about us to come and visit us, where we can extend this very warm welcome to you.
Best wishes,
Philip Masterson
Principal
Ready to Teach – our pedagogical model
The QKA Way
Team QKA: “Working hard, ready for anything”
Our mission is that we do whatever it takes to ensure every student achieves their full potential and develops a love of learning.
We expect every school day to start positively for every child, and we work tirelessly to ensure all our students are Ready for School and Ready to Learn.
Equally, we expect all our teachers to be Ready to Teach. It is part of our mission that the broad range of learning opportunities we deliver to our learners are always fully planned and prepared to activate learning.
We aim for all our students to develop to become independent learners. We know that the more engaged our students are learning that they know and understand is relevant to them, the more motivated they will be to think hard about not just what they have learned, but how they have learned it.
As a result, we expect all our students to develop a positive mindset, and to be Ready to Succeed throughout their time at QKA.
Our vision: our students leave us with the tools, experiences, values, knowledge and skills to reach their potential: successful learners, confident individuals, effective contributors, responsible citizens.
We are committed to providing a rich and relevant education that transforms lives and gives all of our children the opportunities they deserve. We want to inspire and equip our learners with the skills, knowledge and attitudes to learn effectively both independently, and with and from others.
By the time they leave Queen Katharine Academy, we want all our students to be empowered to be in charge of their own lives, to be fully engaged in their futures and motivated to shape society and the world around them.
The Curriculum Vision at QKA
At QKA a subject curriculum is the body of knowledge students will learn and the skills they will acquire in order to go on to study the subject at university.
We ask every subject leader to imagine that every child arriving at QKA in year 7 will proceed to choose to study that subject at university. This means we are preparing our curriculum to inspire a love of learning in our students in that subject, and to equip them with the knowledge and skills they need to be able to continue to progress in that subject to the highest level possible.
To achieve this, we make sure that each subject’s curriculum is mapped out for each year ensuring that the body of knowledge is meaningfully sequenced and that the range of skills required by our learners to achieve and succeed develop progressively over time, recognising that each stage of their education demands more of them.
The education we provide for our learners is organised into three areas so that it can be easily understood by all our stakeholders. These areas are:
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Our curriculum intent – the explanation of why we choose to teach what we teach.
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Our curriculum implementation- this is how we teach what we teach.
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Our curriculum impact- this is how we know how well pupils have learnt what we have taught them.
We want our curriculum to transform the lives of every child who arrives at QKA. To do this, we provide an education built on three central pillars, which take into account the context of our school. These are:
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a strong focus on literacy to make learning accessible to all
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appropriate and responsive scaffolding to be inclusive
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high expectations to close gaps