Our Curriculum
The National Curriculum
Our school curriculum includes the programmes of study outlined in the National Curriculum and forms part of our wider school curriculum.
The National Curriculum specifies what children will learn from Year 1 onwards in the following subjects:
- Literacy
- Mathematics
- Science
- Art
- Design and technology
- Computing
- Music
- History
- Geography
- Physical Education
- A Modern Foreign Language
We use an accredited Systematic Synthetic Phonics Programme to teach early reading. The programme we use at this school is Twinkl.
The School Curriculum
In addition to the National Curriculum, character development is part of our curriculum. This is because we believe it is important that our children learn to be curious, confident, self-directed learners. This underpins our vision to help children to grow healthy bodies, loving hearts and inquisitive minds.
Our Personal Development curriculum includes social, moral, spiritual and cultural education primarily through our Relationships, Sex and Health Education Programme and Religious Education. Further details on this aspect of the curriculum can be found in the Personal Development section of our website.
We also have a comprehensive Religious Education Curriculum that teaches children a range of faiths through the lenses of theology, philosophy and human social sciences . At least half of the RE curriculum is devoted to Christianity.
Our Curricular Plans
We have adapted a consistent approach to curricular planning across the school to ensure all learning is cumulative and builds on prior learning. We have included a number of links below so that you can see our curriculum and understand what children will learn as they progress through the school.
Subject Progression through knowledge progression statements
Knowledge
All Knowledge in our curriculum has a purpose. It either contributes to conceptual understanding or a skills. Not all skills are transferable across contexts. For example, the creative skill in art requires knowledge and understanding of shape, colour, form, line and pattern whereas the creative skill in composing music requires knowledge and understanding of dynamics, timbre, melody and tempo.
Procedural knowledge is the knowledge children need in order to know how to do something or perform a skill. This knowledge needs to be carefully sequenced and applied by the child in the right order and sequence. For example, measuring an angle requires a step by step procedure.
Conceptual knowledge is the knowledge needed to help a child understand a concept. For example, understanding why it gets dark at night, children need to know that the earth receives light from the sun; they need to know the Earth is spherical and rotates and when the side of the earth faces away from the sun, the earth plunges into darkness. When this occurs we call this darkness night.
We can further break down knowledge into disciplinary knowledge. Substantive knowledge is content taught as established fact. Disciplinary knowledge is knowing how to gain knowledge in different subject disciplines e.g. Scientists gain knowledge through carry out tests and repeated observations whereas historians look for clues to interptet what life might have been like in the past.
Skills
Skills are the application of key knowledge in the correct order and sequence. The knowledge children need to complete increasingly complex tasks are planned into our curricular framework at each phase as children get older and deepen their knowledge and understanding of key concepts.
In reading for example, children first learn the sound each letter shape makes. Next they learn that words are made by blending these sounds together. This is knowledge. The process of reading is applying this knowledge. As children become more fluent at decoding print, they are taught the knowledge they need for reading comprehension.
We have identified what children need to know to be an effective reader. For example, children need to know authors use figurative language to convey meaning beyond the literal. Without this knowledge children will find it difficult to understand phrases such as 'the shopkeeper had a heart of stone'.
Similarly, children are also taught to know an apostrophe can change the meaning of a word from plural to indicate possession e.g. girl’s as opposed to girls or that a pronoun indicates a person or object that has been previously referred to.
Likewise, children are taught to know that a word can change meaning depending on the context e.g. the cricketer hit the ball with a bat as opposed to the bat flew out of the cave. This is all essential knowledge children need to know and then apply in to perform the process or skill of reading.
Phonics
Phonics is a method of teaching children early reading by correlating sounds with alphabetic symbols. The teaching programme we use is Twinkl. This is an accredited Systematic Synthetic Phonic teaching approach approved by the Department of Education.
Our phonics programme begins in our nursery setting where children engage in indirect learning that equips children with auditory and visual discrimination skills needed to recognise subtle differences in sounds and letter shapes.
Children learn the skill of segmentation. This means separating a whole word into corresponding units of sound called phonemes. This programme begins in the Reception and continues through to the end of Year 2. Children who have not reached the expected standard continue with the programme in Year 3 and beyond.