Curriculum

Our Curriculum Statement

Inclusivity

We ensure our curriculum is accessible to all; we work to ensure our pedagogical approach is varied ensuring all learning styles are addressed. The curriculum is not narrowed for any groups of learners it is adapted and differentiated to ensure all children have access to all curriculum areas. Some children with very high needs have a more personalized curriculum, still accessing a broad range of subjects.

Curriculum Intent

Our creative curriculum has been designed to inspire children’s curiosity and to equip them with the knowledge and skills to become independent life-long learners.

By ensuring learning is purposeful and often rooted in real-life contexts children are able to apply their knowledge and skills across the curriculum and beyond.

Through the sequencing, layering and revisiting of learning on their journey through school, children develop their long-term memory and a deeper more profound understanding of what they have been taught.

Through the development of questioning and encouraging children to take a more investigative approach to their learning, they become critical thinkers who are able to pose and explore their own questions. 

Curriculum Design

We deliver the National Curriculum 2014 throughout Key Stage 1 and 2 providing pupils with ‘an introduction to the essential knowledge that they need to be educated citizens and to the best that has been thought and said, helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement’.

We regard the curriculum as the progression model.

 We focus on knowledge progression mainly through subject specific models within the context of themes or topics. Hence, our long-term aim is for our curriculum to be coherently planned, organised and structured with key concepts identified and prioritised, built upon and revisited. 

Curriculum Implementation:

‘Learning is defined as an alteration in long-term memory. If nothing has been altered in long-term memory, then nothing has been learned.’

Sweller et al. 2011

We aim to ensure retrieval practice is built in to strengthen memory by:

• Providing overviews
• Calling attention to main ideas;
• Providing daily, weekly and monthly reviews.
• Re-teaching when necessary.

We regard teaching as effective when underpinned by Rosenshine’s ‘Principles of Instruction’. Effective questioning, effective use of formative assessment and adaptive, responsive teaching are regarded as key. We regard the following teachers’ knowledge as essential:

• pedagogical knowledge: teachers’ knowledge of effective teaching methods; -
• content knowledge: teachers’ subject knowledge;
• pedagogical content knowledge: teachers’ knowledge of how to teach the particular subject / topic e.g. knowing the misconceptions that arise prior to teaching specific key knowledge.

Curriculum Impact

We measure this by the extent to which our aims, curriculum defined end points and strong outcomes are achieved as a result of our curriculum intent and implementation. Our aim is that the vast majority of our pupils will have sustained mastery of key, detailed knowledge identified and some children will have a greater depth of understanding.

‘If a student has learnt the curriculum, they have made progress.’

Michael Fordham