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Curriculum Overview
Introduction and Rationale
Our bespoke curriculum was designed over the last four years to be contextualized for the children at Front Lawn. It is the result of research into different models of curriculum design and analysis of the needs of the children at the school.
Firstly, we believe passionately that our curriculum should be broad and balanced therefore our curriculum provides a range of experiences for our children. The core outcome for our curriculum is for all children to leave us with a strong sense of morality and to have a strong awareness of the range of possibilities that are available to them in the outside world. The school's key values are explained to the children through our moral compass (see below) and our culture and our climate for learning provide the following drivers that underpin all areas of our curriculum:
- Possibilities - which helps children to build aspirations and know available possibilities for their future lives
- Initiative - which helps children grow as independent learners, not dependent on adults to learn
- Happiness - which helps our children to focus on the positive and fully make the most of their lives
- Community - which helps our children to make a real difference to the area in which they live
Children enjoy a full spectrum of academic, physical, spiritual, moral, social, cultural activities that enrich their lives. There is equal balance between social and academic learning and we provide a variety of ways in which we help children to protect and learn about their own mental health.
Our curriculum provides appropriate balance by ensuring:
- All children should feel clever and experience the feeling of accomplishment in a wide range of areas.
- an excellent mix of academic and personal development.
- equal importance to core and foundation subjects.
- Physical well-being and mental well-being are both valued and prioritised by our careful consideration of curriculum design.
- SMSC development, along with a well planned and structured programme of personal development underpins all our work and is as closely monitored as academic subjects
- We carefully balance the requirement for pupils to reach ARE in core subjects with our wider curriculum aims of providing a balanced range of enriching experiences.
As a result our pupils thrive.
Although our core outcome is to instil a strong moral compass in all our children we also:
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Provide outstanding outcomes for the future of young people in the 21st Century and beyond.
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Engage children in a relevant, meaningful and challenging curriculum that stimulates, allows and supports their learning developing fluency and expertise.
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Ensure that every child exceeds their full academic potential within school and reaches an emotional maturity that allows them to be fully involved in the local community.
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Develop children's desires to be ambitious, use their initiative, have a strong sense of community and have positive mental health that enables them to be happy.
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Ensure excellent delivery of carefully sequenced, powerful knowledge that children can transfer between subjects and phases of their education.
In order to ensure that learning in every subject is sequenced appropriately and in line with the national curriculum , we have created Progression Documents for all subjects (see below). These ensure that learning is staged and builds on prior knowledge. This provides the children with the opportunity to revisit vital skills and knowledge regularly and embed this learning; therefore becoming experts.
We recognise that to succeed and excel in further education and adult life, a purely content based curriculum is not fit for purpose.
Our children need the skills and characteristics to lead their own learning, inspire themselves to progress and have confidence and to collaborate with their peers and wider society. We also understand the importance positive mental health has on children and strive to place this at the heart of all we do.
Consequently, during all lessons taught – alongside the learning objective – will be the Independent Learner Skills that are being developed and embedded in the children during that lesson. These are vital ‘life-skills’ that we refer to as Positive Powers. These are skills that we believe all children need to succeed in school today as well as in their everyday life and future careers.
During every lesson, the teacher and children will decide which of the skills/power they will be using or developing and this will be discussed with the children where appropriate therefore creating a symbiosis between the learning and life-skills.
Curriculum Implementation:
At Front Lawn we have worked hard with all staff to ensure we have a consistent pedagogical approach. Our approach to teaching can be found by clicking on the Approach to Teaching star. This consistency ensures that all children are taught to a high standard, in all year groups, in all subjects.
Curriculum Impact:
We ensure that we track children's progress in all subjects. We believe this is important because every child is brilliant at something and deserves the chance to receive feedback, make progress and experience opportunities to deepen their learning in all subjects.
If you would like more information on our curriculum please contact Kate Couldwell (Headteacher), Sarah Read (Deputy Headteacher) or Amanda Grant (Deputy Headteacher)
Every child and family who joins our setting will have their own knowledge and experiences that will link to their culture and wider family. This might include: languages, beliefs, traditions, cultural and family heritage, interests, travel and work.
Research shows that when children and families, cultures are valued, both the child’s experience of learning and progress can benefit (Hussain et al., 2018 and Gazzard, E.2018) Cultural capital is the accumulation of knowledge, behaviours and skills that a child can draw upon and which demonstrates their cultural awareness, knowledge and competence: it is one of the key ingredients a pupil will draw upon to be successful in society, their career and the world of work. Cultural capital gives power. It helps children achieve goals, become successful and rise up the social ladder without necessarily having wealth or financial capital. Cultural capital is having assets that give children the desire to aspire and achieve social mobility whatever their starting point.
At Front Lawn Primary Academy, children benefit from a carefully sequenced curriculum that builds on what they understand and know already. We believe that exposure, not only to culture but also to situations in which children might not have previous experiences of, is of paramount importance to their ongoing success.
Gradually widening children’s experiences as they progress through school is an important step in providing rich and engaging learning across the curriculum. We plan carefully for children to have progressively richer experiences in nursery and beyond. These include trips to the local park, shops and visits to places of worship, museum, sports and music venues just to name a few.
We recognise that being in a disadvantaged area; it is likely that children at Front Lawn Primary Academy may not regularly benefit from culture rich opportunities. Therefore, we endeavour to provide these for our pupils throughout each academic year.
Additionally we recognise that cultural capital extends beyond trips and visits to the amount of powerful knowledge children have. Therefore we have ensured that children get the opportunity to experience and retain a wide range of powerful knowledge through the curriculum choices we have made. Our aim is that this will allow them to be able to engage in philosophical debate and make informed choices as they move onto secondary school. The core and procedural knowledge that children will be taught is located in the progression of knowledge documents. The facilitating knowledge, which will help to build their cultural capital and make links between topics and subjects, is located in the Knowledge webs.
We are aware that there is a huge amount in the national curriculum that needs to be covered and that this can lead to surface level learning as opposed to real expertise.
We have identified content across certain subjects (breadth) that can be taught through a daily dashboard. This content is a mixture of skills and knowledge that we have identified as essential to embed in children's long-term memory. The daily dashboard is a tool that enables teachers to drip feed certain skills and knowledge daily for a short period of time.
This is particularly useful for Music (appreciation), Maths (times tables, time, number bonds etc), Geography (locating countries and oceans and looking at weather patterns), Spanish and the teaching of vocabulary.
Teachers plan explicitly for this.
We believe it is vital to allow children the time for repetition and over learning of key concepts and the curriculum is planned in order to allow the time for this without overloading the children.
Autumn Daily Dashboard Overview
We recognise that to succeed and excel in further education and adult life, a purely content based curriculum is not fit for purpose. Our children need the skills and characteristics to lead their own learning, inspire themselves to progress and have confidence to collaborate with their peers and wider society.
Consequently, during all lessons taught – alongside the learning objective – will be the Independent Learner Skills that are being developed and embedded in the children during that lesson. These are vital ‘life-skills’ that we believe all children need to succeed.
During every lesson, the teacher and children will decide which of the skills they will be using or developing and this will be displayed next to the learning objective. Creating a symbiosis between the learning and life-skills.
Year Group Curriculum Maps and Curriculum Coverage