Our Curriculum Old

We define ‘Our Curriculum’ as

‘every planned learning experience in school’

This includes the National Curriculum but is so much more than that! We want our curriculum to be relevant for every child, learning about their immediate environment and about the wider world.

What and how we teach and how we organise it across our school varies as children get older, as they can concentrate for longer and as the content of their learning becomes more complex.

Balancing the curriculum in primary school is complicated. We want children to have a joined up, connected experience with learning that is full of joy and excitement. We want children to experience the rigour of learning the skills and knowledge of separate subjects, inspiring them to want to continue to learn out of school and as they move through the school system. We want them to thrive in their primary school years; yes, we are preparing them for their future but we also want them to enjoy the experience right now!

Our Reception classes continue the Early Years learning that children will have had if they have attended nursery.

In Key Stage 1 and 2, we have been working hard at designing a timetable that enables high quality curriculum delivery. We coordinate this across Phases (Y1/2, Y3/4, Y5/6) so that we are efficient teams but still give space for staff to respond to their class, their prior learning and their own experiences.

We have designed our week, terms and school year to meet the varying demands of the range of subjects in the National Curriculum and the additional experiences we want our children to have.

In each half term, we have 5 core weeks of learning. These contain an entire unit of English and Maths teaching. In each of these weeks, half a day is PPA time (teachers are released from class to prepare, plan and assess) and we cover this with specialist teaching in Physical Education, Music and Languages. One other half day is our second PE lesson and a Computing lesson.

This leaves 3 afternoons each week where we have blocked subjects. This means children and staff can plan thoroughly for the learning outcomes of these blocks. For two weeks, these afternoons are Science, for two weeks they are humanities (Geography and History) and for one week we teach Art. The overviews of these weeks for each Phase is available below.

When a half term is more than 5 weeks, we use the other days for focused RE days, Design Technology projects and additional whole school projects that we think are important.

Year Group Overviews

Subject Overviews