Dixons Brooklands Academy

At Dixons Brooklands Academy, we provide a first-class education to maximise students’ opportunities to live fulfilling lives and make a difference in their community.

The highest of expectations delivers the best outcomes and improves the lives of young people, so we are relentless in our work with students and families, and this requires dedication and support from all members of our school community. We work hard, uphold our standards, treat everyone with kindness, and behind everything we do is the conviction that education and high expectations are the recipes for success. Dixons Brooklands Academy is a school on a journey. As part of Dixons Academies Trust, we are implementing a completely new approach designed specifically to serve our local community. In our achievement-oriented culture, it is cool to be smart and all students will maximise their opportunities to live a fulfilling life and make a difference in their community.

Culture is the priority for us. Getting the culture right means that students can show their true potential. We will focus on developing the very best of learning habits and, allied with research based best practice and the benefits of being part of an outstanding Trust, the academy will go from strength to strength. These are exciting times for our students.

Our students and staff are committed to three core values that underpin everything we do:

• Work Hard
  We never give up; we do what it takes for as long as it takes. We are industrious and curious.
• Have Integrity
  We always do the right thing because it is the right thing to do.
• Be Kind
  We play by the rules. We are polite, considerate and kind.

We also focus on three key drivers: Mastery, which is the drive to get better at things that matter; Autonomy, or the drive to direct our own lives; and Purpose, which is the drive to connect to a cause larger than ourselves (Dan Pink, ‘Drive‘). We clearly communicate our mission, values and drivers throughout every day so that the whole school community know the purpose of everything that we do. Through rigour, simplicity and a relentless focus on success, all students work hard every day to climb the mountain to university.

As a Dixons academy, our curriculum is aligned to a common set of trust-wide principles which are underpinned by our mission to challenge educational and social disadvantage in the North. We believe all students are entitled to an ambitious, knowledge-rich curriculum which will open doors and maximise life chances.

At Dixons Brooklands Academy, we challenge social inequality by instilling shared powerful knowledge through an academic curriculum which is broad and balanced. Each subject specifies, in detail, the knowledge (both substantive and procedural) students will remember, underpinned by the national curriculum and wider subject domains. As such, in each discipline, students are prepared for national assessments, and importantly, acquire knowledge from all cultural domains that builds wider cultural capital.

Our curriculum is informed by the latest evidential research from cognitive science about memory, forgetting and practice in order to help students remember more, and apply, the best of what has been thought and said. By employing our curriculum as progression model, we make knowledge stick so that it can be flexibly applied in a variety of different contexts and situations.

Running alongside our subject specialist curriculum are our Morning Meetings. Our students in Year 7 to 11 start each morning with Morning Meeting that supports our students’ vocabulary, metacognition, and acquisition of powerful knowledge. Morning Meeting follows a similar format across every year group. Morning Meetings have a specific focus on knowledge acquisition through retrieval practice as we believe that knowledge is the foundation for learning.

At Dixons Brooklands Academy, we teach our students powerful knowledge so that they can understand and interpret the world and to think in new and unexpected ways. With the democratisation of knowledge, our students will be incredibly successful in high stakes examinations and will go on to use this understanding to achieve great things in the world.