Curriculum

Curriculum

OUR OFSTED PRIMARY INSPECTION DATA SUMMARY REPORT SHOWS VERY POSITIVE ATTAINMENT AND ATTENDANCE - TO READ THE FULL REPORT CLICK HERE AND READ THE ATTACHED DOCUMENT

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What are Our Vision, Values & Aims For Our Teaching and The Curriculum?

At Malcolm Sargent Primary School, our vision is that children should be taught how to learn, the importance and pleasure of learning, alongside being taught the skills they need for life. The teaching and planning of our curriculum, is central in ensuring our vision and values are reflected within the outcomes of pupils over their 7 year journey with us.

Our teaching and the school curriculum must instill and create a love of learning in all children, through our values:

Ensuring we engage and inspire  the children to want to learn, to find out more, to become independent, self-motivating and enthusiastic, striving to achieve well and reach their full potential - and who will ultimately want to continue learning and achieving beyond their 7 years with us.

Ensuring we nurture and grow  life-long skills that will provide a firm and positive platform from which to continue developing in the future – socially, emotionally, personally, culturally, morally and spiritually. It must instill strong British values that will grow a deeper understanding of the world we live in, and our place within it as respectful future citizens.

Ensuring we provide the children with a sense of pride and joy in their achievements and in other people’s, a sense of belonging and pride to be a part of a school and wider community, and the importance of working together to achieve the very best we can, supporting others to do the same.

Our teaching should reflect our vision and values at all times, but should also meet our aims to:

  • Respect and value each individual child – to ensure they feel part of a team, where everyone works together to learn, where they feel safe and secure to be themselves, explore their ideas, succeed with pride and make mistakes with a positive attitude of self-improvement
  • Motivate and encourage children to learn through a positive and trusting environment that rewards and celebrates success
  • Give the children the least help possible, to encourage them to lead their own learning; becoming independent and self-motivating through a range of strategies such as:
    o   exploration, enquiring, investigating, questioning
    o   dialogic learning, promoting and developing articulate and accurate speaking and listening, discussion and debate within lessons
    o   solving problems, working in teams, and individually to overcome challenges and find out things for themselves
    o   take ownership over their learning by being involved in the learning process – knowing what they need to achieve and how to achieve it, and given the tools to do this for themselves
  • Offer high quality first teaching for all, where the children that need the most support, have more teacher contact time to help them
  • Direct adults and resources to enable the teacher to fulfil their role effectively
  • At all times provide at least the basic aged related skills to all children who have the potential to meet these expectations
  • Ensure all children are challenged to reach their individual potential through carefully differentiated support and challenge
  • Offer additional support for those children that are not reaching their potential, which may include those children with additional needs
  • Makes reasonable adjustments to our expectations and the curriculum for those children that do have additional needs
  • Ensure children understand the goals and targets , the outcomes of their learning journey, what they have achieved so far, and what they need to do next in order to achieve them
  • Work in a strong partnership with parents to achieve high standards and achievement for all children
  • When designing our curriculum, we will ensure it upholds the values above, but should also meet the aims to be:
  • Challenging – to ensure children reach the highest possible standards and academic achievements, fulfilling their individual potential.
  • Relevant and purposeful – to ensure children understand why they are learning, how to apply skills outside of the classroom and buy-in to the learning experience.
  • Fun – to ensure children enjoy coming to school, and take part in activities that they will remember.
  • Broad and balanced – to give children a rounded and full curriculum experience and ensure all children have opportunity to find out what they are good at, and what they need support with, to find and foster interests, hobbies and pursuits that will last them for life.
  • Inclusive – to give all children, no matter how they might prefer to learn, whatever medical needs or disabilities they may have, their social or economic background, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation or individual characteristics - a curriculum that ensures they reach their full potential.
  • Assessed –children’s progress and attainment of the curriculum they receive is continuously assessed in order to know which skills need to be taught more, or taught differently; to know which children need the most support; to know what the next steps are to challenge each child to reach their full potential.

When assessing children’s attainment and progress in our curriculum, we will ensure it upholds the values above, but should also meet the aims to:

  • Continuously assess children’s attainment of age related skills to make judgements based on children’s day to day ability, to decide whether the child is attaining in line with age related expectations, or whether they are attaining above them, or below them, and then to make quick adjustments to the teaching within the lesson; to planning and to the curriculum.
  • Track progress of children’s attainment in the curriculum, so as to make adjustments to the curriculum, planning, delivery of lessons; and to identify children who may require additional support to reach their potential.
  • Moderate judgments about children’s attainment and progress with other teachers to ensure they are accurate.

How Does Our Curriculum Work? 

Our curriculum is skills based. The skills within the curriculum are age related and progressive, ensuring children acquire new skills, whilst embedding and consolidating the skills from previous years. The skills for our curriculum are taken from the year group expectations in the National Curriculum.

Teachers have the responsibility to design their own inspirational, relevant and challenging curriculum, ensuring it meets the vision, values and aims set out above, taking account of the National Curriculum.

Year groups are responsible for working together to design their curriculum each year, ensuring all age related skills are covered and progress from the year below, to the year above. The skills are mapped within long and medium term plans. The content is mapped within the year group’s Curriculum Offers, which they design and share with the wider community.

Our curriculum skills remain the same each year whilst the content is fluid and can change year on year, depending on for example; local, regional and national initiatives, events, current affairs, opportunities to the school, the passions of the children and of the teachers that teach them - all of which are used to build the content with which to develop the skills within each year group.

When children are at Primary age, the most important skills for their future, is the abilities to read, write and understand basic mathematics. The skills in these core academic areas are taught discretely through the National Curriculum Reading, Writing, Spelling, Punctuation & Grammar (SPAG) and Mathematics sections. They are consolidated to a point where children have truly understood to a deep and long lasting level – when they have mastered the skills.

To master skills in Reading, Writing and Maths, they must be applied to a range of contexts and purposes in their own subjects and in other curriculum areas. For example - when a child can use a full stop when writing instructions for a kit-car, when listing a method for a science experiment, when writing a report on Georgian history or designing an advert for a geographical location – it has been mastered. In this way, our Curriculum Offers design cross curricular experiences to apply skills in a range of contexts and purposes to offer a broad and balanced curriculum and opportunities for mastering the essentials for life.

Our curriculum offers will deliver the progressive acquisition of skills in all National Curriculum areas and also:

  • British Values & community cohesion
  • Finance and enterprise
  • Environmental awareness

Parents have the right to withdraw their children from Sex & Relationships Education and Religious Education, if they apply in writing to the Principal stating their reasons.

How Is Our Curriculum Developed? 

To ensure the curriculum subject areas are continually developed in line with national research, incentives, initiatives and changes to

National Curriculum expectations and content - teaching and support staff are encouraged to join curriculum teams, based on their passions, skills, experience and expertise. The teams will work together on building changes into the curriculum subject procedures and practices, training staff, researching developments, signposting relevant curriculum opportunities, quality assurance. Team size and constitution will depend on the level of priority for each curriculum area to be developed. High priority development work within the curriculum is found within the School Development Plan, led by senior leaders.

How Is Our Curriculum Quality Assured? 

The curriculum is assured against the vision, values and aims set out above.

The curriculum is designed in year group teams, where skills are listed within long and medium term plans and content designed in the Curriculum Offers. Senior leaders scrutinise the plans and offers against the policy before they are agreed.

Senior leaders will evaluate the impact of the curriculum using:

  • Pupil outcomes (achievement)
  • School governance
  • Feedback from parents, children and teaching staff

The Governing Body Curriculum Committee will evaluate the effectiveness of the school curriculum through the committee charter.

For further details on each curriculum subject click here.

For further information on our term by term curriculum offer by year group, please click here.