Curriculum Intent Statement

Our Curriculum Vision Statement:

  • Ensure our children aspire to be the best that they can be, enabling and building on academic foundations and a love of learning.
  • Offer a rich curriculum experience that promotes language development and develops cultural capital in all areas.
  • Empower children to have high self-esteem and be learners who are resilient when faced with a challenge.
  • Encourage and support children to lead lives that are physical and mentally healthy.
  • Enable everyone to be proud of and a part of our school and local community.
Intent
  • Our curriculum has been designed to cover all of the skills, knowledge and understanding as set out in the ambitious National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage Framework. We then enhance and supplement the National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage by ensuring that it relates to our locality and the heritage of our pupils. In addition, we enrich learning through providing a range of opportunities, visits, visitors and experiences that build meaningful and real-life learning. For example, the Wanderlust programme.
  • We map the National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage Framework into a coherent, sequential progression model for each subject that outlines the substantive knowledge, disciplinary knowledge, vocabulary and sentence stems needed at each stage that builds cumulatively towards learners being able to use and apply their knowledge, skills and understanding across a range of concepts, making purposeful links. When covering each subject, the progression grids are carefully organised by staff teams through a long-term plan. Knowledge, vocabulary and skills are planned for at a greater level of detail in medium term plans.
  • Subjects are enhanced through additional schemes such as Read, Write Inc, Jane Considine: The Write Stuff, White Rose Maths Hub, NCETM and SCARF. Meaningful links with other subjects are made, where purposeful, to strengthen connections and understanding for pupils, enabling pupils to know more and remember more.
Implementation
  • We ensure all teachers, including those who are in experienced or non-specialist, have excellent subject knowledge and are supported in the implementation of the curriculum.
  • Oracy is woven throughout all curriculum areas, with each subject progression model detailing the oracy expectations for each year group, the tiered technical vocabulary required and suggested sentence stems. Oracy is also taught through explicit sessions, which focus on the four strands of good talk.
  • All learning will begin by revisiting prior knowledge. This will be scaffolded to support children to recall previous learning and make connections. Daily review is used at the beginning of every session to activate prior learning in order for new learning to ‘stick’ to.
  • New learning is introduced in small meaningful chunks to support children’s cognitive load.
  • High quality modelling of language is provided through teacher talk, using flash cards and ‘my turn your turn’.
  • Teachers support children to practice new learning, questioning for understanding, checking for misconceptions and giving clear and appropriate feedback. This moves children from supported practice to independence at the correct pace for them, ensuring all children are challenged. Learning will be supported through the use of knowledge organisers that provide children with scaffolding that supports them to retain new facts and vocabulary in their long-term memory.
  • Knowledge organisers are used for pre-teaching and to scaffold learning. Consistent learning walls in every classroom provide constant scaffolding for children. Tier three specific vocabulary, based on the research of Alex Quigley, is displayed on the learning wall along with substantive knowledge, sentence stems, and model exemplars of the work being taught. Shared spaces around school display subject work from early years to the end of KS1, highlighting the curriculum content and concepts that are developed over time.
  • Weekly sharing of subject floor books and curriculum quizzes are used to review learning and check that children know more and remember more. Learning is reviewed, half termly and termly, after a period of forgetting, so that teachers can check whether information has been retained. Assessment is ongoing throughout the relevant cross-curricular themes to inform teachers with their lesson planning, activities, scaffolding and adaptive teaching methods. Our children will be given a variety of experiences both in and out of the classroom, where appropriate, to create memorable learning opportunities and to further support and develop their understanding and language acquisition.
  • Please see each subject ‘Curriculum Delivery Document’ guidance for more detail and examples.
Impact
  • The impact of our curriculum is shown in several ways. In core subjects, impact is shown through the progress and outcomes of pupils in national testing. In addition, pupil voice and the quality of work in pupils’ books demonstrates the deeper impact on pupils knowing more and remembering more.
  • In the wider curriculum, pupil voice shows that pupils are confident and able to talk about what they have learnt using subject specific vocabulary.
  • Pupil voice also demonstrates that pupils enjoy and are able to recall their learning over time. Pupils’ work demonstrates that the curriculum is taught at an age appropriate standard across each year group with opportunities planned in for pupils working at greater depth. Work across the curriculum is of good quality and demonstrates that pupils are acquiring knowledge, skills and vocabulary in an appropriate sequence so that they know more and remember more.