Curriculum Intent

Science is a discipline that gives us a fulfilling understanding of the macroscopic world around us, by exploring its microscopic components, the relationships between things and the transfer of energy between them. It also reveals its own scientific methods as a way of observing the world around us to reliably generate evidence and test ideas, which brings confidence and clarity to an uncertain world.

The Science Mastery curriculum builds on pupils’ scientific understanding from KS1 and KS2. The principal focus of science teaching in KS1 and KS2 is to enable pupils to ‘broaden their scientific view of the world around them and develop an understanding of a wide range of scientific ideas’ (DfE, 2015).

Pupils are first introduced to the subject disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics at KS3, and the principal focus of science teaching at this stage is to allow pupils to ‘develop a deeper understanding of content within each of the three subject disciplines’ (DfE,2015). This remains the principal focus in KS4, which explains why the Science Mastery curriculum shows a five-year progression of content and skills within each of the three subject disciplines.

By the end of KS4, pupils are expected to ‘appreciate the achievements of science in showing how the complex and diverse phenomena of the natural world can be described in terms of a number of key ideas relating to the sciences which are inter-linked, and which are of universal application’ (DfE, 2015).

To ensure all young people are able to do this, the Science Mastery curriculum sequences the knowledge and content pupils must learn across the five years of secondary education under a series of ‘big ideas’. The Science Mastery curriculum provides the foundations for understanding the natural world by ensuring the delivery of accurate scientific knowledge and supplying relevant and engaging example applications of this knowledge. The curriculum also allows pupils to appreciate how our increasingly technological society is evolving using engaging news stories and novel applications.