Curriculum

National Curriculum

PRIMARY_national_curriculum Dfe.pdf

Our St Mary Bourne Curriculum

Curriculum

At St Mary Bourne Primary School, we follow the objectives of the National Curriculum 2014 and Early Years Foundation Stage but have designed our own creative and engaging curriculum to meet the needs of all our children.

Our curriculum will shape creative, curious, and reflective learners who will enhance our school values of:

• Teamwork
• Respect
• Enthusiasm
• Excellence

At SMB Primary School, our intent is to create an exciting curriculum that will inspire and enable life-long learning, steeped in securing key skills and challenging each child to achieve success.   

Our Intent

• Be purposeful with clear learning outcomes.
• Be creative, exciting and relevant.
• Make relevant links across subjects and teach a progression of skills across all subject areas.
• Provide opportunities for problem solving and reasoning.
• Follow a rotated curriculum map to take into account mixed-age classes.
• Use the outdoors as a vehicle to teach the curriculum with regular activities taking place outside the classroom.
• Embrace ICT and technological developments to provide and enhance learning opportunities to prepare children for a technological world.
• Challenge and inspire children to deepen their knowledge and understanding.
• Create a sense of independence and support children in their organisational skills.
• Celebrate achievements and determination.
• Foster self-confidence and ownership in our children.
• Provide extra-curriculum opportunities to broaden our curriculum.
• Provide opportunities to learn through visits and visitors and foster links with our local community.
• Encourage children to think of others and respect everyone.
• Provide a range of opportunities to learn through first-hand experiences.
• Help children make sense of their learning, evaluate their work, set targets and take an increasing share in the responsibility of their work.
• Build resilient learners with a positive mindset.
• Enable children to reflect, refine and improve their ideas and learning.
• Support all children in striving for their very best in all areas of the curriculum and school life.
• Foster interdependence including team work and working collaboratively
• Reflect the world around us including current events and British Values.
• Be global, making links with international schools, celebrating other modern languages and making global links across the curriculum
• Encourage children to apply attitudes, skills and knowledge to new situations and extend their understanding.
• Prepare children for future challenges through our personal, social and health education, which helps children to develop personal and social skills.
• Encourage children to ask questions in a safe environment.
• To foster an enjoyment of learning.

Implementation

Curriculum drivers

As a school we have identified three key drivers that are integrated into all aspects of our curriculum. These are:

Global links

We are extremely proud of our International School Award from the British Council and global links are embedded throughout our curriculum. We have a link with a school in Uganda and France which includes working on shared topics. We also celebrate key events such as European Day of Languages and have an exciting MFL curriculum.

Community          

We work hard to embed into our curriculum rich experiences linked to our local, immediate environment. This has included working with the local village exploring the river in Geography, creating art exhibitions for the local Flower Show and World of Work days where members of the community share their skills with the children.  We encourage the children to look beyond themselves and consider how they might contribute to the lives of others. We also look to educate our children to the diversity in the world outside their own. 

Outdoor learning

Our curriculum

Effective teaching and learning requires pupils to be excited, motivated and engaged in their learning. For this reason, we have developed a curriculum, which meets the needs of all learners.

The curriculum is a carefully planned with teaching and learning designed to support children’s natural curiosity and stimulate their creativity. It offers children the opportunity to work in depth, giving them the time they need to reflect, consolidate and transfer their learning.

Children need to be engaged in and excited about their learning, to feel involved in the process and have a level of anticipation about what will happen next. We work hard to make links between subjects and look for ‘hooks’ onto which we can generate an enthusiasm. In planning topics, we look at using our community and linking it to real problems and issues.

We provide opportunities for children to make connections between different aspects of the curriculum. Carefully planned opportunities support children to deepen understanding, and develop their skills in relevant contexts. Topics are chosen that allow us to work within the National Curriculum, but they also provide opportunity for a breadth of study across many subjects. We ensure a coherent learning experience for our pupils, linking appropriate curricular areas.

Progression of Skills

Taking account of prior learning and specific needs, we plan for continuous progression for our learners. The curriculum is carefully mapped out on a three year cycle and this will be constantly evolving to meet the needs of each cohort. School tracking and monitoring systems help us focus on continuous improvement and the use of End of Year Expectations provides benchmarks of learning across the curricular areas.

We encourage our learners to be creative and independent thinkers and use a wide range of strategies and techniques. each child is encouraged to use the school key learning skills-concentration, curiosity, creativity, collaboration, challenge, resilience and reflection- that are developed across the school and integral to all topics. We encourage children to be reflective learners, identifying when and how they will use what they have learned in later life.

Challenge and Enjoyment

At St Mary Bourne Primary we have high expectations of all learners’ attainment and achievements. We provide our learners with appropriately challenging experiences that are active and engaging, taking into account the needs and abilities of individuals. We provide opportunities for challenge through carefully structured lessons and differentiation strategies and support children to choose their own level of work and challenge.

Enrichment, Additional Breadth and Choice

Within our curriculum framework, we provide enrichment opportunities to cultivate well-being, academic and personal development.

Examples include:

Opportunities for Personal Achievement

Throughout their time at St Mary Bourne Primary School, we place high value on learners’ personal successes. We celebrate successes both in and outside school through Celebration Assemblies, Class Assemblies, Newsletters, Star of the Week certificates and Excellence awards. Our marble-based team points system also recognises a wide range of achievements and the team cup is awarded annually to the house with the most points. Recognising and supporting wider achievement provides children with a sense of satisfaction and helps to build motivation, resilience and confidence.

We work hard to create a culture that supports the belief that we learn through our mistakes and everyone can improve. This culture, which runs through our curriculum, supports the use of misconceptions and mistakes as a point from which to learn. Pupils are encouraged to ‘have a go’, challenge themselves and step outside their comfort zone to deepen understanding.

Impact

Monitoring, Evaluation and Review

The quality and effectiveness of the curriculum will be monitored and evaluated through:

• feedback from children
• evidence of learning in books, monitoring data and presentations of learning
• successful trips and activities led by visitors
• using work-sampling, lesson observations, pupil surveys, data analysis and this is evidenced in Performance Management documentation as targets and outcomes
• staff meetings and briefings

Our St Mary Bourne Primary curriculumCurriculum ModelCurriculum cycle - overvie