Curriculum
Our Curriculum
The content of our unique curriculum is driven by the National Curriculum.
Each subject area has been carefully sequenced by subject coordinators. Key end points for each subject, in each year are identified, assessed and embedded. Thus ensuring that skills (know how - procedural memory) and knowledge (know what - semantic memory) progression, is a coherent and progressive learning journey, enabling pupils to know more, remember more and be able to do more.
Subject integrity is prioritised within teacher planning but where opportunities arise horizontally (across subjects areas), curriculum links are identified and woven into the child’s learning experience.
The curriculum is ambitious and designed to give all pupils the skills, knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life. We aim to create a curriculum and learning climate founded on enquiry, which builds on embedding reasoning and questioning. P4C pedagogy deepens children’s understanding of big ideas and key concepts. These principles enable children to become confident, thinking communicators that make links across their learning and experiences.
Our Context
Our school sits just three miles from the centre of a globally recognised and fast moving city. It is a city that is known for its sports, arts, music and history.
The continually changing ethnic makeup of Whalley Range and Manchester means that the school community continues to grow in its diversity. It has a rich, diverse community that is represented in our school by both its students and staff. We wanted to design a curriculum that teaches about the richness of living in such a diverse community and promotes how understanding communities and cultures, both historically and currently, can enable us all to embrace differences
Curriculum Intent
Intention one: Our learners will achieve excellent and sustained academic progress.
Intention two: Our learners will develop effective lifelong learning behaviours.
Intention three: Our learners will be supported to think critically and creatively.
Intention four: Our learners will become well informed and responsible citizens.
Curriculum Impact
Our well established Assessment for Learning practices enable all staff and pupils to assess and adjust in the moment.
Our feedback policy ensures that staff and children are alert to any misconceptions or gaps in knowledge; time and support is provided when necessary.
Subject Leaders monitor and support the success of children’s learning every term; providing feedback to practitioners and the Senior Leadership team.
Subject Leaders focus on compliance, quality and effectiveness, and assessment. To gather evidence subject leaders talk to pupils, look at pupil books and watch learning in process with a forensic look at how learning builds on previous learning, depth and breadth of knowledge, pupils’ progress and effective practice.
Classroom practitioners use half termly check points to ensure that learners are ready for their next phase of learning in that subject area. Subject specific end points are assessed by each year group and monitored by subject leaders to analyse curriculum effectiveness.
In our Core subject areas key data in analysed each term, with effective data being supported by rigorous moderating.
Curriculum Implementation
Each of our individual subject curriculums are driven by the National Curriculum aims and requirements. Knowledge and skills are sequenced for each subject by well-informed subject coordinators, ensuring that effective sequencing and progression occurs whilst cognitive load is managed effectively. Each subject has half termly units of works planned to support the effective teaching and learning of the subject.
Expert subject leads support staff through ongoing CPD and planning/classroom support to enable quality first teaching to occur along with tailored support where required.
Transferring Skills and Knowledge to long term memory:
Within each classroom we have the following practices to aid our children to know more and remember more.
Elaborative interrogation - carefully designed questions and tasks that require children to deepen and connecting their learning through reasoning.
Self-explanation - during the learning process, opportunities are provided to explain thinking (adult/child and child/child), talk prompts support this dialogue.
Interleaved practice - our timetables and curriculum unit plans allow for children to build their skills and knowledge in each subject gradually and incrementally. Our whole school themes allow subject connections when possible.
Distributed practice - our spiral curriculum
Key features of the spiral curriculum are:
- The student revisits a topic, theme or subject several times throughout their school career.
- The complexity of the topic or theme increases with each revisit.
- New learning has a relationship with old learning and is put in context with the old information.
We believe that our pupils benefit from a spiral curriculum:
- Information is reinforced and solidified each time the student revisits the subject matter.
- It allows a logical progression from simplistic ideas to complicated ideas.
- Learning is embedded when students apply the early knowledge to later course objective
Practice testing - our weekly low stakes quizzes which take place in each classroom, recap the key knowledge that week and are built upon each week over the half-term.
The key skills and knowledge are made clear to all practitioners through our half termly check points and our end points at the end of each academic year, in each subject area.
Please find more information about our individual curriculums below.