Threshold Concepts

The curriculum for each CSAT school has been designed by each school to address the needs and ambitions for their own individual community. The breadth of the curriculum within each school reflects their curriculum drivers and cultural capital gaps as well as the vision and values of each school.

However, CSAT schools have all designed and organised their curriculum around shared Trust subject specific threshold concepts. Subject leaders from all CSAT schools worked together to decide upon the "big ideas" that will be explored in every year group for each subject. All CSAT children have the same opportunity to continually increase their understanding of what CSAT believes to be the most important aspects within each subject.

The threshold concepts are repeated each year and repeated within many different contexts but are revisited using progressive descriptors.  The understanding required within each concept is increasingly more demanding but can be processed in relation to previously learned knowledge. The subject leaders from the CSAT schools also worked together to devise the progression milestones which outline the knowledge that is required at the end of particular phases.

CSAT utilized Trust wide curriculum expertise to determine subject specific threshold concepts on which all subject learning would be attached, and then devised the progressive end points to ensure that subject knowledge within each concept would build  over time.