Our curriculum is driven by a team of well supported leaders and champions to ensure that learning is well planned, sequences and tailored to meet the needs of all learners, from Nursery to Year 6. Our curriculum has been designed so that contents, activities and interactions activate learners' curiosity and promote exploration.
Key features include:
- Investing in professional growth of out teaching staff through high quality training.
- A clear whole school implementation model for teaching and learning to ensure consistency across classes and that evidence informed practice underpins our approach to pedagogy.
- Supportive learning environments.
- Use of progression maps and knowledge organisers.
- A focus on the essentials: early reading, oracy and vocabulary.
- Strong curriculum design.
Please read our detailed curriculum vision and intent document for more details.
Curriculum Delivery in EYFS
The EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) is taught through a thematic, play-based curriculum. We teach the seven areas of the Early Years curriculum.
We ensure there is a mix of child and adult initiated learning opportunities across both the prime and specific areas. All pupils develop and learn at different rates and so our Early Years curriculum is purposefully flexible to meet the needs of all learners and of course take into account individual interests. Our Early Years teaching staff use interactions and observations to plan next step learning for pupils.
The Characteristics of Effective Learning underpin our curriculum. Through an enabling environment we ensure we provide meaningful opportunities for playing, active learning, creating and thinking critically. As pupils utilise and develop these characteristics, they become effective and motivated learners who demonstrate high levels of well-being and involvement.
We follow the Development Matters four guiding principles, focusing on the aspects of 'unique', 'positive relationships' and 'enabling environments', which lead to 'learning and developing'.
Please visit our EYFS Curriculum page here for a more detailed overview of our EYFS curriculum.
Curriculum Delivery in Key Stage 1 & 2
Once the pupils enter Year 1 subjects are taught discretely to ensure the integrity of each subject-specific knowledge remains. This enables our pupils to think as 'historians', 'geographers' and 'scientists'. They are clear about the focus of the lessons they are in and the subjects they are learning. Connections across subjects are made where it is appropriate and where it supports pupils to know more and remember more.
Please see our subject vision documents and high level plans for more details.
Schemes of Work
To support the delivery of our curriculum and further ensure that it is knowledge rich, connected, coherent and cumulative, we have selected a number of published schemes of work. These schemes form the basis of our curriculum but we have personalised for our school and our context.
Assessment
We use assessment to generate information which can be used to make decisions about learning, leading to improved outcomes for pupils. We do this in multiple ways:
- Verbal feedback to pupils in lessons
- Following our whole school marking & feedback policy
- Self and peer assessment
- Low stakes quizzing
- Multiple choice questions
- Spaced practice and retrieval practice
- High quality questioning
- End of unit response tasks to answer a 'BIG question'
- Teachers adapt weekly planning as required to support all learners
- Termly parent consultation meetings to share back learning progress
- Curriculum Leaders and Subject Champions carry out half termly subject reviews
- Pupil voice