Our curriculum is underpinned by our core values:

KINDNESS          UNIQUENESS        COMMUNITY

Alongside our core values, we have five driving principles that are the foundations of our curriculum.  These are the building bricks that we have used to create our curriculum.

We have developed a two-year rolling curriculum for each class.  We have thought carefully about what we are going to teach, when we are going to teach it, how we are going to teach it and why we are going to teach it to our children.  We feel it is vital that our curriculum is relevant to our children.  We have also considered carefully the impact of the two national lockdowns and made changes to our curriculum where necessary to ensure key skills and key knowledge are fully covered.

We want to help our children understand the world they live in, the world they are going to be living in and their place within that world.  As such, we've considered key concepts that we believe are important in today's world and will continue to be important in tomorrow's world.  These key concepts occur within year groups, across year groups and across different subjects.

We have looked carefully at how the subjects develop across the years.  We have made sure that we are building on the knowledge, vocabulary and skills across all subjects and that opportunities are created for children to make connections to their prior learning.  

We want all our children to be able to reach the same successes and be able to access all elements of our curriculum.  To assist them with this, we feel it is essential to focus on explicitly teaching new vocabulary.  We do this through a number of approaches.  Firstly, we focus on using language rich texts across our curriculum and encouraging children to read a range of challenging texts.  We also explicitly teach Tier 3 words, which are subject specific words, through our Knowledge Organisers (see below) and our foundation subject lessons.  In addition to this, we have discrete vocabulary sessions where we explicitly teach Tier 2 words.  These are the kinds of words that can occur frequently across a number of subjects but that a lot children will not know unless explicitly taught.  Having knowledge of a large number of Tier 2 words ensures our children are better placed to access and understand a number of texts and subjects.

For each topic, we have created a Knowledge Organiser which is shared with the children and parents at the beginning of each term.  These have all the key knowledge that we want the children to learn and secure into their long-term memory.  All science, geography and history lessons will focus on learning and developing this key knowledge.  To assist the children in securing this knowledge into their long-term memory, we carry out low-stakes retrieval practise activities at the beginning of every foundation subject lesson.  We also give the children opportunities to show the knowledge they have learned through writing short, informative essays throughout the term.

Each term, we have an enrichment week.  We go off timetable for a week and focus on one key area.  During these enrichment weeks, our children work collaboratively across the year groups on a range of projects and experiences.  In the past, we have had a drama week, an enterprise week, a Spanish week, a science week, a French week and a very popular art week.  We hold our art week every two years and it culminates with an extremely professional art exhibition of the children's work at a local gallery.