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Curriculum Purpose and Structure

Intent

When designing our curriculum, the intent was to deliver on our Vision:- to help give our children the means to shape their own life well, to live up to their potential, tap into their strengths, feel appreciated and appreciate themselves; to support them to be compassionate young people who appreciate the value and preciousness of each and every person and all life on earth; to encourage them to take a delight in learning and feel part of something bigger than themselves.

Structure

Our Milestones documents lay out the progressive acquisition of concepts and ideas across different age phases. The National Curriculum remains our basic scaffold but the precise content of the curriculum and its delivery are defined by our context and our beliefs.

As they progress through school, we look for sensible and logical ways for substantive knowledge to be linked – this to better support understanding. For example in history the substantive concept of invasion may be revisited on 2 or 3 occasions across the curriculum.

We also look to build the disciplinary knowledge unique to each subject so that by the time they leave our school they have a keen grasp of different ways of learning. For example we want them to know what it is to be a scientist and to feel enthusiastic at the prospect of science.

We have also run 4 curriculum threads through the curriculum which are based on our community context and which represent a core body of understanding both substantive and attitudinal that help to further link knowledge and purpose and increase challenge and thinking. In these ways we want our pupils to become not just enthused but inspired or concerned or morally engaged in the knowledge they are encountering (including encouraging a sense of responsibility) and this will lead to better access to any given topic as well as to deeper thinking and questioning around that topic. Our threads are:-

  1. A sense of belonging: Rationale: Concerns about declining mental health amongst young people. The positive impact on mental health of individuals’ sense of community/ sense of belonging. The importance of feeling connected for the development for an individual’s spiritual development.
  2. Compassion for the World: Rationale: The importance of nature and connecting with the world around you for an individual’s spiritual development. Concerns for the environment – the importance of giving children some agency. For spiritual development, the importance of service and of taking opportunities to reach out and make a difference to the world.
  3. Appreciation of difference: Rationale: A predominantly mono-cultural community and a growing SEND profile, including high levels of neuro-divergency. The importance of feeling connected to yourself, to others; the importance of feeling valued and heard. “I have learnt that there are many people you can be friends with. Every person you meet is a new opportunity. I think talk partners help this.” Yr 6
  4. Awe and Wonder: Rationale: The importance of beauty as a window into the divine; as a source of awe and wonder. A creative local community. “We need to keep true to the strengths. I want to keep them so I need to continue working on them. I don’t want to lose them as I appreciate the fact that I see the beauty in everything. Pupil talking about one of their strengths- seeing beauty

All these structural aspects of the curriculum come together in our medium term planning, in our Knowledge Organisers. KO’s detail the core knowledge and skills, vocabulary and spiritual opportunities to be covered in each unit in each subject.

Implementation

Given our pupil population (high attaining as well as including a high % of pupils with SEND) we need to adopt an approach that is both highly inclusive and challenging; both highly motivating and reducing of cognitive load.

At the level of the curriculum, our response to this has been multi-layered. Where we can we make a unit more relevant to pupils’ lives and/or narrow the focus of a topic and go deep and/or provide a moral, spiritual or very practical purpose for the learning and/or find interesting cognitively stimulating ways to apply knowledge in different contexts, we take those opportunities well.

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