Flexible Fridays

There is no one reason for the introduction of Flexible Fridays into the curriculum at St Joseph's, rather an amalgam of reasons. They are as follows:

• To promote and integrate cross curricular themes into the curriculum
  
  
• Literacy
• Numeracy
• Thinking Skills
• Independent Learning

These become integral rather than add-ons to the curriculum.

• The College already delivered P.H.S.E., Citizenship and Business & Enterprise skills via tutorials and/or single days. Flexible Friday has allowed the preparation and delivery of these areas to be closely linked and to be seen as such by students and staff.

• St Joseph's is a Business and Enterprise College. Enterprise skills and competencies of communication, team work, initiative, time and resource management, flexibility and risk taking, reflection and improving, thinking methods, learning styles, finding and using information are seen as the keys to success. 'Practice what we preach'.

• To enable subject departments to work with other often very different departmental areas, e.g. English, Science, allowing for cross fertilization of ideas as well as skills.

• Flexible Fridays have introduced the capacity to put back creativity into the curriculum. Departments/individuals are able to experiment and try out new ideas.

• Flexible Fridays enable departments to have whole/half days learning and teaching sessions thus enabling in-depth study and, in the case of some subjects, more practical based work.

• The longer learning and teaching sessions on a Flexible Friday lead directly into the longer sessions needed to deliver the Diploma and option subjects in September 2008. Flexible Friday has enabled both students and staff to be more at ease with the longer sessions.

• Links into the introduction of an Accelerated Two Year Curriculum at the College in September 2007. Two year intensive Key Stage 3.

• Educational visits can be arranged on the one prescribed day of a two week timetabling cycle. Visits are thus directly linked to curriculum delivery. One of the other positive knock-on effects has been less disruption to the timetable on the other nine days.

• To motivate, energise and engage students by getting them to think outside the normal 50 minutes sessions and thus be more open to change and experiment.