Curriculum

Our school recognises every child as a unique individual, celebrating and welcoming differences within our inclusive school community.

Our curriculum is designed to build resilience and respect, enabling our children to become creative and critical thinkers with well-developed interpersonal skills who understand how they learn. We recognise and build on each child’s prior learning and provide a wealth of first-hand experiences and enhancement opportunities to engage them. Learning opportunities available throughout our communities and surrounding areas are used and woven into our curriculum. We firmly believe childhood should be a happy, investigative and enquiring time where there are no limits to curiosity and there is a thirst for knowledge.

In our opinion, play and playfulness are part of life and any education that does not communicate joy, wonder, amazement, fascination and delight has failed. In the Bible it says, ‘Joy in learning is the mark of a good teacher and well-taught pupil’ (Proverbs 8: 30-31).

Children leave our school with a sense of community belonging and the confidence and skills to make decisions, self-evaluate, make connections and become lifelong learners.

In Autumn 2019, in conjunction with All Saints and Ullesthorpe schools, we embarked on a substantial review of our whole-school curriculum. Our motivation was to ensure that, in every subject, our children continue to have as many rich and empowering opportunities as possible in ways which reflect their lives, the changing world around them and their future.

The implementation of our new 'hub' curriculum began in Autumn 2020 and has been designed with several principles at its core. These have been derived from research conducted by scientists and psychologists – however, this is not the end of our journey. As we move forwards, school leaders, subject leaders, class teachers and governors will continue to build on our curriculum offer. We recognise that our curriculum is a 'living' document and that it will continue to evolve.

To ensure a consistency of vision across the curriculum, we follow several, core philosophies.

These are:

• A spiral curriculum, with knowledge being built on activated prior knowledge.
• Teach less, but teach it deeper, and teach it better.
• Built in retrieval and practice.
• Inclusion of facts+skills+experiences to make the knowledge we want our children to learn.
• That, with something like a dozen secondary schools that our pupils could go to, we might not be able to present the exact knowledge our pupils need, but we can instill in them the love of learning they will need to succeed.
• That our Hub might not have the necessary depth of knowledge for every subject, but we acknowledge that our teachers are pedagogical experts, and know our pupils well, and that we are becoming curriculum experts, where we can see and identify the features a curriculum needs to support and nurture our pupils.
• That to be successful learners, our pupils need subject knowledge and the learning knowledge. Pupils will need to be taught emotional regulation and metacognition skills and awareness, so they can, over time, take control of their own learning, and understand how and when to apply their resilience and perseverance.
• We also recognise that our curriculum journey starts, and is built on, a successful and comprehensive EYFS curriculum. EYFS forms the foundation of every subject, its assessment informs every teacher in every year group, and its principles extend into KS1.

Our curriculum consists of the following core subjects: Maths, Literacy (including writing, reading, phonics and handwriting), P.E., Science and MFL. As Church Schools, we also have RE as a core subject. With the recent pandemic, and the impacts it has had on our pupils' wellbeing, we have also promoted PSHE to a core subject. Our foundation subjects are: Art, Design Technology, History, Geography and Computing.

We are also moving towards greater sustainability. This doesn’t just cover our environmental impact, or the awareness in our pupils of their future obligations to our world. It also includes having a curriculum approach that can be maintained and exploited to the highest standards, all while keeping stakeholder wellbeing and participation at its core.

More details about our curriculum can be found in the curriculum maps below as well as through clicking on the subject specific icons. In addition, class teachers send out curriculum newsletters at the start of each term