Curriculum Rationale

School vision: Lighting the hearts and minds of our community

Our curriculum is underpinned by our school values: Respect, Resilience and Responsibility

We aim to light the children’s hearts and minds at the start of their educational journey by:

• Developing happy, confident and resilient learners.
• Empowering our children to contribute positively to society by being good citizens.
• Fostering a love of learning and inviting curiosity.
• Meeting the child’s individual needs to ensure they can be the best versions of themselves.
• Providing a broad and balanced curriculum that ensures depth and breadth of understanding.  This will enable children to retain knowledge and skills taught to prepare them for the next stages of education and adult life.

Our curriculum is applied throughout by:

• ‘Levelling the playing field’. Providing high quality enrichment activities that capture children’s interest, talents and narrow the gap for disadvantaged children. Our annual plan provides a whole school overview for the year ensuring that trips and visitors are balanced across the school and between subjects.
• Establishing a coherently sequenced whole-school long-term plan from Pre-school to Year 2. This includes Curriculum Overviews and elements of progression documents which specify when curriculum areas are covered and how they build on each other.
• Medium term planning which details the national curriculum objectives taught, core knowledge, key vocabulary and skills to be learnt.
• The creation of Knowledge Organisers for each lesson sequence (Maths, Science and Foundation subjects) that clearly detail the core knowledge and vocabulary taught in those lessons. These organisers also include links to prior learning and are shared with staff, parents, carers and children.
• A clear lesson structure focussed on retrieval, imparting knowledge, opportunities to apply knowledge and review new learning.
• Utilising widgets and sentence stems to support children’s knowledge acquisition and develop vocabulary.
• Evaluating and reviewing curriculum overviews to feed into curriculum planning for the following year.
• Supporting our subject leaders through high quality CPD and dedicated time to lead their subject.
• Placing reading at the heart of our curriculum, ensuring high quality texts are available for all subjects and promoting a love of reading through daily reading related activities.

 

We deliver a curriculum that:

• Places the importance of reading at the heart of children’s learning
• Develops children’s subject specific skills in each area of the broader curriculum.
• Is knowledge rich and focusses on children knowing and remembering more.
• Focusses on key vocabulary and uses a range of oracy opportunities to enable language development.
• Provides regular retrieval opportunities to ensure that learning is not forgotten 
• Requires children to develop the skills to work collaboratively and independently in order to achieve better outcomes.

The impact of our curriculum

• Improvement in overall end of Key Stage results.
• Improvement in percentage of children passing Phonics Screening check.
• Narrowed gap between boys and girls in Reading and Maths.
• Our children talk positively about the curriculum and are able to share their learning with parents and staff.

What our children think about our curriculum

For more detailed information about our curriculum please visit the subject pages in this section.