CurriCulum Statement of intent
Our CLIMB values demonstrate a holistic understanding of what it is to be human and the place education has in reflecting, supporting and developing this for our children and community. Because of this we believe in offering a broad and balanced curriculum, following the Statutory Early Years and Foundation Stage & National Curriculums + RE, in which all subjects are recognised for the contribution they make to developing the whole child.
A broad and balanced curriculum enables us to meet children’s needs, challenge expectations, introduce them to opportunities and help them to be the people they need to be now and lay the foundations for who they are to become. We place a huge emphasis on Reading as it helps children to access all curriculum areas; builds vocabulary to help them be critical thinkers; and empowers achievement.
We intend to teach a curriculum that reaches the full ambitions of the National Curriculum. Our curriculum is based on the integrity and distinctness of each Subject Discipline thereby supporting the knowledge children gain so that they become confident learners within each subject.
Equalities
We continually develop our curriculum to be as representative of the world and our community as possible. We aim to celebrate diversity and promote acceptance and respect. We want a curriculum that allows our children to regularly learn about, and be inspired by, individuals of all abilities from all backgrounds, cultures, genders, sexualities, religions and ethnicities. We aim that the celebration of differences is embedded in our lessons and discussed frequently. We are committed to having a balanced, diverse and fair curriculum. We believe that our pupils should be exposed to ideas and concepts that may challenge their understanding, to help ensure that pupils learn to become more accepting and inclusive of others. Challenging and controversial concepts will be delivered in a way that prevents discrimination and promotes inclusive attitudes.
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Curriculum Statements
To help you understand each subject within our curriculum we have created a Curriculum Statement, which starts with the National Curriculum Aims for the subject and a description of how we interpret it at our school and how we organise learning to achieve those aims.
Within each Statement we have created a visual description of the Subject Structure, heavily informed by Ofsted’s Research Reviews, showing how all the Subject’s elements are structured and relate to each other. This helps us to then organise a child’s learning journey with the curricular disciplines at the centre of what we do.
The next part of each Statement is a Learning Journey to show the children what they should encounter within their time at school. This breaks down into learning sequences that the teachers plan from to help the children organise their learning. We wish our children to be ambitious learners with an eye on potential careers and so we help them consider the Learning Journey that they are on and how each subject can support them in options that they have through education to become engaged members of society.
The Learning Journey also describes the Subject in a child friendly way, so that they can learn what constitutes the subject they are learning. We aim to teach both the ‘Discipline’ of each subject and what makes the subject distinctive alongside the knowledge that is inherent to that subject- the Substantive Knowledge.
We have identified Milestones in some subjects that define the standards for the subject discipline for each Phase of learning (2 years) This is often where content relates to matters that need to taught within two year cycles to facilitate coverage of content of the National Curriculum without undue repetition– (History for instance) Where this occurs there are also Year Group progressions in disciplinary knowledge to help set sequences and expectations for learners in each year group as they progress through the curriculum.
Schemes and Sequences
In some subjects, to ensure we have the highest standards of curriculum continuity and expectation we use carefully selected published schemes. We adapt these however to strengthen them and personalise them to our own children’s learning journey and needs. This helps with teacher workload as the wheel is not being reinvented, but teachers can invest in and apply their own creativity and strengths to inspire children’s learning.
Implementation
Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it:
1) learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
2) Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
3) Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
In addition to these three principles we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term and that sustained mastery takes time, and so we try to show the children the whole learning journey they are on and the part that a particular lesson sequence is securing.
We have identified a sequence of vocabulary for each subject area and provide children with sentence stems that help them use this vocabulary in the context of the way each subject discipline works. In this way we expect children to use an ever expanding vocabulary in a rich and meaningful way.
Impact
The intended impact of our curriculum is that by the end of each Phase, the vast majority of pupils have sustained mastery of the content, that is, they remember it sufficiently and are fluent in it to enable them to work within the next Phase or Year Group’s learning; some pupils have a greater depth of understanding. We track carefully to ensure pupils are on track to reach the expectations of our curriculum and that they are knowing more and remembering more over time.
Teachers use a variety of methods of measuring progress (lesson re-caps, quizzing, work within lessons, assessed pieces of work, testing) and attainment, making observational assessments in the short-term (within lessons) and termly at the end of units of work.
Each teacher is a Subject Leader and reviews the curriculum for continuous improvement measures, adaptations and changes that need to be made for helping learning happen most effectively.
