Health and Social Care Department - Overarching Curriculum Intent (2024-2025) 

RFSS Curriculum Vision Statement: 

To build an inclusive curriculum which is aspirational for all and empowers our students to make outstanding academic and personal progress.  

Health and Social Care Curriculum in Context: 

Over the past decade there has been a huge shift in the research behind how we should be approaching health and social care, this has come from many reviews into the current approach as well as serious case reviews over the past decade that have identified a need to change the approach to more person-centered care. In order to not just treat a symptom of a person's health but look at the root cause of it then support the person through a holistic and integrative approach. Combine this with the concerning staff shortages within Health and Social Care and a need for reforms to help support the widening increasing numbers of adults in social care you find the need to educate our young people on careers in this section as well as how to help prevent conditions from happening in the first place for themselves and others. Truly being preventative rather than reactive.  

Our Health and Social Care curriculum aims to empower and educate our students in deeper understanding of how we grow and develop as humans and therefore how different factors can impact this, then how these can be influential on our long-term health and happiness. Students learn in detail different supportive measures from interventions, to how to create and establish care plans for individuals, and how to involve multi-disciplinary approaches to a person's care. Underpinning all of this is their knowledge of the wide range of roles within the Health Care and Social Care sectors will grow over the 3 or 5 years they are studying the subject, learning how the 2 co-exist together and are supported by different agencies. Our curriculum ensures student’s are shown and taught how to make changes within a person's life by using real case studies of a diverse range of people to help them develop empathy, compassion, effective communication skills and a reality of the challenges of life people face. Which in return helps them to reflect on their own attributes, building resilience and a deeper understanding of the changes that can be made. Students studying Health and Social Care can aspire to move into careers that support dementia patients, work as nurses and midwives, they can become support workers and carers, amongst learning about the background staff who help the settings to function, meaning that they can aspire to be anyone, whilst developing the knowledge of how to work with a wide range of people and know how to support themselves and those around them throughout their life.  

Curriculum Aims: 

Our curriculum aims to: 

• Empower our student’s knowledge about the influential factors that impact development across the life stages  

• Supports students to challenge their own ethics through developing empathy and the ability to look at issues from differing perspectives to help them solve problems.  

• Develop student’s curiosity through the vast range of real-life case studies we refer to.  

• Inspire students to learn about and pursue different careers within the Health and Social Care sectors 

• Empower students to know what support is out there for themselves and others and how this support can help overcome barriers to care.  

Our broad and balanced curriculum concentrates on developing our students’ key knowledge and skills, and enhances their understanding of the world around them.   

We do this by: 

•  Stimulating intellectual curiosity by introducing them to a vast range of psychological theories that help to understand human development, which encourages them to independently reflect on the world around them.  

• Facilitating collaboration through learning about the importance of multi-disciplinary approaches to support people. 

• Promoting challenge for all, irrespective of starting point, as this is a new subject at KS4 or KS5 students are challenged from the first lesson with learning new content and themes that they haven't faced before.  

• Enabling creativity, by supporting a person holistically within their work and practically they develop the skills to think outside the box and how this creative thinking and abstract thought can help support people who need it the most.  

• Sequencing learning to ensure logical progression, both horizontally and vertically, units are taught in an order to ensure that themes and knowledge that underpins all units is taught first, with all students starting with pre-requisite content first to ensure there is a base starting point.  

• Revisiting previous learning to support the transfer to long-term memory, students are taught how to make connections between content, which is explicitly taught throughout the course meaning that as their knowledge grows, they can see how it all connects, helping to put theory into context, across the units.  

Our curriculum is focused on the development of communication, character and cultural capital of each individual student, so they become: 

• Compassionate individuals who ask the question ‘What happened?’ rather than ‘What's wrong?’ 

• More resilient due to understanding what creates resilience and how this can be practiced.  

• Moral practitioners who logically think about the approaches they take when confronted with ethical problems  

• Caring individuals who want to help and support those around them.  

Curriculum Outcome: 

As a result of our curriculum students will leave with the skills and knowledge to be compassionate, caring, courageous, competent, committed and effective communicators. They will have the knowledge of how they can make a difference to another person's life no matter what they choose to do.