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St Anne's CE VC Primary School Respect Responsibility Friendship Excellence

Curriculum Rationale

Curriculum Intent

 

The curriculum at St Anne’s CE Primary School is designed to be engaging, broad and rich. It is a curriculum that evolves, based on the needs of our children and changes in the world around us. It takes into account the local context of the school, experiences and backgrounds of our children and provides them with relevant and memorable learning experiences to enable them to become rounded successful citizens. It supports and promotes the vision and values of our school, based upon Christian teachings and beliefs in which all members of the school community are equally valued and respected.

 

Our Vision for St Anne’s is to nurture and develop the whole child through our Christian values, enabling them to reach their full potential in all aspects of life. Children leave St Anne’s CE Primary School, ready for Secondary School, equipped with the experiences, skills and knowledge they need to function as young people and adults in the 21st Century. They develop a sense of belonging and desire to contribute and influence their local and global communities.

 

The curriculum is inclusive and aims for all pupils to be challenged. It focuses on vocabulary development and experiences, which increase children’s cultural capital to allow them to reach full potential. It fulfils the requirements of the National Curriculum through ambitious and challenging enquiry led learning, with clear progression and specific learning goals for every subject. It is deep, allowing children to return to and build upon previous learning, applying skills and knowledge to new challenges.

 

All curriculum leaders show understanding of key concepts related to curriculum design, ensuring there are clear skills, knowledge progression and sequencing, allowing all members of the school community to fully understand the rationale behind our curriculum.

 

Implementation

 

Depth

 

Our curriculum at St Anne’s CE Primary School is carefully designed, organised and planned for depth of learning.

 

Our definition of progress is; the widening and deepening of essential knowledge, skills, understanding and learning behaviours.  We design, organise and plan our curriculum to ensure that children are not merely covering content but achieving a depth to their learning, which enables them to use their skills, and understanding in all areas of the curriculum. Our careful curriculum design and planning means that we build in many opportunities for repetition and practise. This ensures that children are able to revisit previous learning, which allows them to gradually develop a deeper understanding of the skills and processes within subjects, at their own pace and in the best possible way for each individual child. Our curriculum is designed to move the nature of children’s thinking to a higher order deep level of understanding rather than just acquiring new facts and knowledge.

 

Balance

 

At St Anne’s CE Primary school we carefully design, plan and implement a curriculum to provide balance for every pupil.

 

It is our underlying belief that every child should feel valued and experience the feeling of success in a wide range of curriculum areas. We believe that through the curriculum we can impact on what is in children’s heads and how they feel about themselves, so that they feel clever, confident and ready to tackle any challenge they may face. We have designed, organised and planned our curriculum to ensure every child receives an appropriate mix of academic and personal development, which means that in practice our curriculum places equal importance on core and foundation subjects. We understand that children will not be successful learners unless they are emotionally secure, therefore we carefully design our curriculum and adopt a flexible approach to timetabling to ensure that we can meet and respond to any issues which may arise. Children’s physical and mental wellbeing are as valued and important as academic development. We carefully monitor children’s progress with their personal development and our well-planned and thoughtful approach to the Spiritual Moral Social Cultural curriculum (SMSC) helps to ensure that every child is well cared for and supported. Our balanced approach to the curriculum is not at the expense of high standards in core subject areas. High standards and enabling children to reach national expectations and above is of vital importance if they are to succeed at the next stage of their education and go on to achieve full and happy lives and careers. Our full and rich curriculum, with its excellent range of experiences, ensures that every child at St Anne’s CE Primary School makes excellent progress both academically and personally. Our unique curriculum ensures that every child is given the opportunity to shine and flourish.

 

Breadth

 

At St Anne’s CE Primary school we carefully design, plan and implement a curriculum, which provides breadth for every pupil. Our curriculum drivers, which are implicitly linked to our learning to learn characters, are:

 

Creativity - we aim to provide experiences that allow the child's creativity to flourish and develop ways to creatively approach all areas of learning

Diversity - we aim to provide experiences that allow children to recognise and celebrate the diversity in our world, both on a local and global scale and understand it is their duty to challenge prejudice in all its forms

Enquiry - we aim to provide experiences where children can be curious and find out about the world around them, with teachers as facilitators of learning

Environment – we aim to provide experiences, which help our children, value their environment and understand their responsibilities towards sustaining their local and global environment.

 

The curriculum also reflects the school’s location, as a semi-rural school in the suburbs of Bristol and the local community, as well as the interests and passions of the staff and children.

 

Our curriculum is further enriched through local community visits and projects, school trips, visiting speakers and residential trips.  We firmly believe that real life experiences like these create lasting memories and strengthen the learning happening in school.  We also have an excellent range of after school clubs including a large range of sporting clubs supported by our teachers and also Up and Under Sports, cooking, photography, recorders and art.

 

We understand the crucial role parents have in promoting learning beyond the school gate and ensuring children make the best possible progress.  We pride ourselves on being an open, friendly and approachable school that encourages parents to be actively involved in children’s learning.  As well as Parents Evenings, we host regular events to inform parents how they can support their child or to come and work alongside their child.

 

We have designed and planned our curriculum to offer a range of experiences, which contribute, to every child receiving a full and rich curriculum.  These support and champion our culture and ensures that our children benefit from a full range of academic and SMSC activities.  These activities enrich their lives and those of our whole school community and make them proud of their British values and diverse society to which belong and play an active part.

We are proud that our curriculum gives our children the skills, confidence and self-belief to lead a happy and fulfilled life by encouraging them to aim high and work towards their goals and dreams in life.

 

The National Curriculum is used as a basis for designing St Anne’s CE School's curriculum to meet the needs of our children while at the same time offering a unique curriculum, with a clear progression of learning and specific learning goals for every subject.

 

SMSC development, alongside Fundamental British Values are woven throughout our curriculum and embedded in all subjects.

 

For more information, visit the subject pages from the curriculum drop down menu.

 

Organisation

 

The St Anne’s CE School Curriculum is organised into immersive cross-curricular topics. The topics vary in length, but are planned to last up to a term. This allows us to create exciting learning journeys and respond to the needs of the children.

 

There is also time and space for whole school topics (e.g. Book, Art, Science or Maths weeks), topics that reflect contemporary events (e.g. the Olympics or Royal Wedding etc.) and topics devised by the children or teachers’ personal interests.

 

Mathematics and English are taught daily as discrete subjects that link to the topics, wherever possible, to allow a comprehensive coverage of skills and provide opportunities to apply what has been learnt in different contexts across the curriculum.

 

Enrichment

 

As well as designing a stimulating engaging curriculum, we are committed to providing enrichment opportunities that enhance learning and contribute to the St Anne’s experience:

 

Forest school and outdoor learning, local trips, educational visits, residential trip in Y6, enrichment activities with hub schools, sporting fixtures, drama and performances, visitors, theatre groups and speakers.

 

We firmly believe that our children learn well out of the classroom. For this reason, every class has a Forest school experience throughout the year. The children spend a half day outdoors in our specialised 'forest' area, where they build shelters, cook on a campfire, play team-building games and do some really exciting activities linked to our curriculum topics. We believe that learning outside the classroom is essential for our children's mental health and well-being, to understand their part in environmental studies and to have fun bonding with their classmates and staff.

 

The outdoor learning environment is also used throughout the school and we encourage children to learn outdoors wherever possible using the outdoor classrooms, sensory garden, playground, pond, outdoor swimming pool and forest school areas.

 

Impact

 

Our curriculum has an ambition for high achievement of all pupils.

 

This achievement is represented in two key areas:

 

• The standards children reach in statutory curriculum areas at the end of each key stage, in relation to their progress and attainment

 

• In reality, we will be measuring how effectively our curriculum helps our pupils develop into well-rounded individuals who embody our values and carry with them the knowledge, skills and attitudes, which will make them lifelong learners, and valuable future citizens.

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