Curriculum

In order to see every child flourish in their learning and be ready for the next phase of their education, we believe we need to particularly nurture and develop our school’s values that are unique to our individual school context;

• Growth: We provide high quality teaching and depth of challenge as well as asking probing questions rather than providing the answers so that children develop independent enquiry and take risks with their learning. 

We want our children to learn about a broad range of possibilities in their lives, so that they can aspire with purpose and ambition. We provide a well sequenced, ambitious curriculum that aims at mastery for all. We do not have ability sets but instead use quality first teaching principles and adaptive teaching strategies to support all children to access the curriculum. We do not put a barrier on what a child can attain.

• Kindness: We teach our children to be considerate and tolerant people who can work positively in the context of difference. RE, PSHE and RSHE, Collective Worship and Reading have significant protected time in our timetable each week so that our children have ample opportunities to develop a mature self-identity and understanding of others.

Treating others with respect and accepting the different opinions and beliefs of others is a crucial life skill which we teach explicitly. We provide an inclusive curriculum which actively seeks to dispel harmful stereotypes and provide opportunities for children to listen to a range of diverse, different perspectives across the curriculum, as well as sharing their own views.

• Integrity: We recognise that our children have or will have significant online lives so we strive to prepare them to be responsible online citizens through how they communicate, and online safety underpins our computing curriculum.

• Joy: Our children need to feel secure in themselves and their environment to learn; they need to believe in themselves as successful people and aim high in order to make great progress. We recognise the value of the arts and sports in supporting good mental health and, for children with additional needs, we work closely with outside agencies to ensure they receive specialist intervention and support.

• Creativity: From creative problem solving to expressing themselves through various outlets, we look to nurture our children’s creativity throughout our curriculum. So that they might flourish academically, socially and mentally, our nurture support, focus on the arts including musical expression, and high quality STEM weeks support children to develop their creativity.

Click here to find out more about how we have designed our curriculum to embed our school values.

How we deliver our curriculum

Design - Our curriculum has been carefully constructed to support all children to make best progress in their learning. Our curriculum is ambitious for all children and, through rigorous formative assessment, scaffolding and adaptive teaching strategies, all children are given access to the full national curriculum. In our school, each subject has a programme of study which specifies the knowledge, skills and vocabulary that the children will be expected to know by the end of each year. Each subject area has been carefully designed to ensure that our curriculum is well sequenced and learning becomes progressively more complex. By designing this spiral curriculum, our children are given opportunities to retrieve and build on prior learning systematically so that they know more and remember more over time.

Delivery - Our curriculum delivery is based on four key principles which are rooted in latest academic research: 

Quality First Teaching

The research - The best available evidence indicates that great teaching is the most important lever schools have to improve pupil attainment. Ensuring every teacher is supported in delivering high-quality teaching is essential to achieving the best outcomes for all children, particularly the most disadvantaged among them. (EEF) Quality First Teaching (QFT) is a style of teaching that emphasises high quality, inclusive teaching for all children in a class. Tom Sherrington (Rosenshine’s Principles in Action, 2019) has grouped the QFT principles of instruction into four strands: reviewing material; questioning; sequencing concepts and modelling; and stages of practice.

Our principle that children learn best in the classroom, with their teacher, means that QFT strategies must be embedded in all classrooms. As such, monitoring of teaching and learning focuses on the extent to which quality first teaching principles are embedded. This key principle of Quality First Teaching enriches the learning of all children including those with higher starting points. 

More information about how we further support children with special educational needs can be found in our ‘SEND Policy and Information Report’.

More information about how we cater for children with protected characteristics can be found in the ‘Equality Information and Objectives’ document.

Retrieval

The research - 1. Learning requires information to be committed to long-term memory. 2. Information is processed through the working memory. 3. The working memory has limited capacity and can be overloaded. Cognitive science informs us that memory has a ‘strength’, referring both to how easily something can be recalled and how deeply information is embedded. When content is studied and recalled, both types of memory strength increase, meaning that information is more easily accessible and that this accessibility is more durable. (EEF).

As well as a carefully designed spiral curriculum to ensure children know more and remember more over time, we build in key retrieval practice within our lessons to support children to make links with prior learning and reduce cognitive load.

Vocabulary

We know that, ‘there is a positive correlation between a pupil’s vocabulary size and their academic success’ (Ofsted July 2022). In our school, vocabulary is explicitly taught, rehearsed and modelled in context. Taught vocabulary is used in classroom displays and supports children’s understanding. The EEF evidence supports this approach as, ‘explicit vocabulary teaching strategies have been shown to be effective, both alone and in combination with implicit vocabulary teaching strategies’. In our wider curriculum, we have focused on the identification of a small number of key words that offer the foundational understanding of a topic (Alex Quigley: Keystone Vocabulary). Further examples of the value we place on vocabulary can be found in our whole class reading sessions, where we have dedicated the first session of the week to identifying, exploring and teaching new vocabulary within the extract that will be studied that week. Additionally, in Maths - where we use the NCETM Math Mastery scheme - key mathematical terms are displayed in every lesson, alongside stem sentences. There is a focus on choral repetition and paired talk throughout the lessons to support all learners in using these terms confidently.

Trips, Visits and Focus Weeks

The other key principle of our approach to the curriculum is ensuring all children experience a range of visits, trips and experiences across the curriculum to broaden their horizons and make meaningful, real life links to their learning. These have been reviewed so that we can be confident that the children experience ‘awe and wonder’ experiences, visits that link directly to our curriculum and a range of trips that maximise the resources available to us in our local area and London.

As well as this, we encourage children’s individual passions and interests through participating in a wide range of sporting fixtures across the borough, music performances at local theatres as well as science, maths and reading competitions against other local schools.

We find ‘focus weeks’ to be a particularly effective way to promote a love of learning across the curriculum, such as Arts weeks and STEM weeks, where we intentionally build links with the local community to enhance learning in these subjects. This includes inviting parent visitors into classes to demonstrate careers in STEM, making links with local secondary schools to lead assemblies, and visiting local secondary schools to use their specialist equipment.