Curriculum Rationale

The aim of our curriculum is to prepare our pupils, ensuring they are equipped with the full range of skills that allows them to be lifelong learners ready for the next steps in their education and as well as preparing them for the wider world. We want them to be relentlessly creative, critically curious and to live ambitiously. 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.

Intent

Our Curriculum

is inclusive and aims for all pupils to be challenged, focusing on vocabulary development and experiences to allow them to reach their full potential.

fulfils the requirements of the National Curriculum through ambitious and challenging enquiry-led learning, with clear progression for every subject.

is deep, allowing children to return to and build upon previous learning, applying skills and knowledge to new challenges.

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 develop their cultural capital.

allows learners to embed key concepts in their long-term memory by revisiting learning and through purposeful practice.

creates a culture of enquiry, curiosity and challenge that encourages children to apply their skills with confidence to new situations.

is carefully designed, organised and planned to deepen children’s disciplinary and substantive knowledge and to increase their conceptual understanding.

provides experiences that allow the child's creativity to flourish and develop ways to creatively approach all areas of learning

allows 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

helps our children, to value their community and understand their responsibilities towards sustaining their local and global environment.

Implementation

Depth, balance and breath

At St Anne’s CE Primary school we provide a safe, secure and aspirational learning environment and the opportunity to participate in a range of stimulating experiences.

Through the curriculum our children will:

be curious, ask probing questions and be brave in finding solutions.  

engage with the familiar and be engaged by the unusual;

be immersed in language and communicate in multiple languages;

know how to practise, be resilient and challenged;

to be proud of their local environment and think on a global scale;

work individually and add their voices to the many

to love difference, be different and stand up for the rights of others just because it is the right thing to do. 

Our curriculum is carefully designed, organised and planned for depth of learning to focus on both disciplinary and substantive knowledge and move the nature of children’s thinking to a higher order, deep level of understanding rather than just acquiring new facts and knowledge.

 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.

Our definition of progress is; the widening and deepening of essential knowledge, skills, understanding and learning behaviours. 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.  

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 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 curriculum design supports and champions our culture and ensures that our children benefit from a full range of academic and SMSC activities alongside Fundamental British Values which are woven throughout the children’s learning experiences and embedded in all subjects.  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.

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, reaching national expectations or above, and personally and ensures that every child is given the opportunity to shine and flourish.

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.

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.

Organisation

The St Anne’s CE School Curriculum is organised into immersive enquiry-led questions and topics where children are states of being. The questions and topics vary in length and  allows us to create exciting learning journeys and respond to the needs of the children.

There is also time and space for whole school focus weeks (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.

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.

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

• How effectively our curriculum helps our pupils to 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.