Harris Academy South Norwood

Harris Academy South Norwood provides the most exciting and promising future for your child. All our students take up the opportunity to lead fulfilled lives with direction and purpose. Our teachers lead with professionalism and scholarship. They are experts in their field. All of us are part of a warm family of staff and governors who have the highest ambition and a deep hunger to learn.

Our school provides the most exciting and promising future for your child. All our students take up the opportunity to lead fulfilled lives with direction and purpose. Our teachers lead with professionalism and scholarship. They are experts in their field. All of us are part of a warm family of staff and governors who have the highest ambition and a deep hunger to learn.

The students understand that they are under a ‘moral obligation’ to develop all their talents and to never waste a minute of their day. We believe that there is nothing without work and nothing without a creative and open-minded approach to learning. Our students are excited by challenge and all of us value knowledge about the reactivity of chemical elements and the poetry of Heaney and Shakespeare as much as we do creativity and the performing arts.

Ours is a cross-site Academy for girls and boys aged 11–19. We have a thriving Sixth Form. The two excellent sites, one in South Norwood and one in Upper Norwood have one ethos. Both sites provide students with the very best in technology and resources that inspire every student.

“We aim to be scholars, citizens and ambassadors. Our curriculum challenges us to explore fundamental truths about the human condition and the physical world, enabling us to become the best version of themselves we can be: turning mirrors into windows.”

This means:

• We always aim to give 100%; to work hard at all times. Through hard work comes success and ultimately happiness.
• We emphasise good manners, strong discipline and smart uniform. We want students to have successful careers, the habits for this start early.
• An ambitious curriculum for all students, scaffolded appropriately for those who need it.
• We believe we should be kind to one another at all times, and seek to foster mutual respect
• We believe we should be grateful for the opportunities and education we receive.
• We believe we should be proud of ourselves and our school, and constantly seek to serve our communities, asking what we can do to make better.
• We ask parents to support and work in partnership with us at all times

We emphasise the difference between performance and learning, focusing attention on the storing of facilitating knowledge and vocabulary into Long-Term Memory, and the use of this knowledge to develop conceptual understanding. This helps ensure we rapidly close gaps between the disadvantaged and advantaged, whilst enabling all students to flourish. Our curriculum extends beyond the classroom to help our students become disciplined and resilient scholars, and active, kind and grateful citizens, who are proud to serve the communities they belong to.

Our curriculum places building vocabulary and knowledge at its heart, helping all our learners develop both conceptual and disciplinary understanding in each subject, and thereby become the best versions of themselves they can be. Developments in cognitive science have shown that the key to academic success and effective scholarship is working hard to ensure that facilitating knowledge and vocabulary is transferred, through rehearsal and retrieval, into Long-Term Memory, and our curriculum places the acquisition of core knowledge at its heart.

It is this permanent store of knowledge that will enable our students to be effective readers, writers, evaluators, and which frees up cognitive space for them to deliberately practice their key subject skills. It is also this store of knowledge that will enable them to be politically literate citizens, able to navigate the diverse and sometimes misleading sources of information of the 21st century.