We follow the same curriculum design as our linked school – Chellaston Junior School – to ensure a consistent approach to our wider curriculum which is sequenced from EYFS to Year 6.

Curriculum Intent

Curriculum design statement: intent, implementation, impact.

Intent

The breadth of our curriculum is designed with three goals in mind:

  • To give children appropriate experiences to develop as confident, responsible citizens;
  • To provide a rich ‘cultural capital’ embedding key vocabulary and experiences throughout school;
  • To provide a coherent and structured curriculum that has breadth of knowledge which is pertinent to our pupils and leads to sustained acquisition of relevant knowledge, skills and understanding of the world around them.
  1. Appropriate experiences

We have developed three curriculum drivers that shape our curriculum, bring about the aims and values of our school and to respond to the particular needs of our pupils and the community.

Our World – this encourages children to think and experience the way in which diversity of people, cultures, religions, opinions and places shape our community and lives within modern Britain and support tolerance, understanding and respect for others.

Expressing Ourselves – this encourages pupils to think and work in creative ways, whilst exploring the world around them. As a school we place a high importance on the arts and the value and enjoyment they bring to life. This is reflected in the curriculum and opportunities we offer.

Our Possibilities – this helps pupils to build aspirations and know available possibilities for their future lives – particularly in the community in which they live.

  1. Cultural capital

Cultural capital is the background knowledge of the world pupils need to infer meaning from what they read, see and hear. It includes vocabulary which, in turn, helps pupils to express themselves in a sophisticated and mature way. Key vocabulary at each phase is identified in our knowledge organisers. At our school we aim to provide a wide range of experience and visits that will support our pupils with this.

  1. A coherently planned curriculum

Underpinned by our three drivers, our curriculum sets out:

  1. to ensure each teacher has clarity as to what to cover, our curriculum has been planned to ensure that the key knowledge within each subject as well as the cultural capital development within each learning theme is clearly planned out across the year groups
  2. knowledge categories that set out the key concepts pupils should understand at the end of each phrase as well as the vocabulary that needs to be embedded

Our curriculum is designed to build on prior knowledge as pupils move through the school. This ensures key knowledge enters pupils’ long-term memory and links can be made across the curriculum.

Implementation

Our curriculum design is based on the principles that learning is most effective with spaced repetition of key skills and knowledge. This is evident through our whole school mapping of learning themes. We also believe that retrieval of previously learned content should be frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength. Our curriculum is newly designed and implementation is still at an early stage. Further training has been planned to facilitate our journey and ensure successful implementation and accurate assessment of our learning themes.

Impact

By the end of each phase the vast majority of pupils will remember and are fluent in the content of our curriculum themes, as highlighted in our knowledge overviews. Some pupils will have a greater depth of understanding. We assess against these to ensure our pupils are on track to reach the expectations of our curriculum. Implementation will be monitored throughout the year to ensure our curriculum is having the impact outlined.

End Point:

By the time our children leave our school we aim to have developed their creative minds so that they can solve problems, recognise the possibilities that are open to them and have increased their self-confidence so that they will leave CIJS with a better understanding of themselves, the world, and aspirations to create a better future for everyone.

For some parts of the curriculum, we use published schemes which are adapted for our school.

Published schemes in use at our school are:

Maths – Power Maths – Pearson

RE – Kapow

PE – Primary PE Planning

PSHE – 3D PSHE

Writing – Literacy Tree

Phonics and Reading – FFT

 

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