Curriculum

The Curriculum Design Statement

What is our curriculum intent?

Our curriculum is designed to enable everyone to thrive and achieve their ambitions. It focuses on being accessible for all and develops the whole child, with our school motto, ‘Valuing Everyone, Growing Together’ at the heart. Our broad and balanced curriculum is shaped using Cornerstones, which is a creative and thematic approach to learning that is mapped to the 2014 Primary National Curriculum to ensure comprehensive coverage of national expectations. Our curriculum is delivered through learning projects, that provide a rich menu of exciting and motivating learning activities, that foster the children’s love of learning, motivating them to succeed. Our lessons challenge, support, and enable children to overcome barriers and foster a lifelong love of learning. Through our golden threads (Understanding the World, Appreciating the World, Sharing the World, Keeping Healthy and Contributing to the World), Christian values (generosity, compassion, courage, perseverance, respect and friendship) and school rules (be kind, try your best and help your community), we ensure that our children are responsible citizens. We seek to nurture ambitious individuals that challenge inequalities and injustice and have concern for the world around them.

How will we implement our curriculum?

Our curriculum is designed to balance the national expectations, involving an all-encompassing range of imaginative learning projects allowing our children to be happy and successful. Clear strategic planning allows the curriculum to be adaptable to children’s needs. Age related expectations combine the acquisition of knowledge and development of skills to create a purposeful and exciting learning journey for every child. The curriculum has high expectations to combine transferable skills, demonstrate a breadth of vocabulary and develop strong cross curricular links. The classroom environments stimulate and engage quality thinking and reasoning. Our marking policy is an opportunity for children to reflect on their learning and respond with clarity and understanding of next steps in their feedback.

We believe children learn better when they are encouraged to use their imagination and apply their learning to engaging contexts. Our curriculum provides lots of learning challenges throughout the academic year that requires children to solve problems, apply themselves creatively and express their knowledge and understanding effectively across the curriculum.
The curriculum has a rigorous essential skills framework that outlines the end of year expectations in all subjects. These essential skills are tied to activities and are age related so that staff can track children’s progress and identify their individual learning needs.

Supporting our golden threads, the curriculum is also enriched with a Forest School in partnership with Wild Woodcraft. Our large woodland is the base for our weekly Forest Schools sessions teaching the children vital learning skills such as teamwork, listening skills and problem solving. This is achieved through activities like bush craft, shelter building and outdoor cooking which nurtures creativity and develops a sense of awe and wonder. Once inside you feel a million miles away from the hustle and bustle of school life. With a mature woodland, large pond area, bat boxes and bird boxes the children also learn all about our precious environment and the importance of protecting it. To develop positive attitudes to health and well-being and encourage our children to have a healthier lifestyle, we use our Sports Premium Funding to effectively improve the quality and variety of sport that is offered. As a church school we follow the Lincolnshire Agreed syllabus and support the teaching of this with the Understanding Christianity resource. This delivers an RE curriculum that supports pupils’ religious literacy enabling pupils to hold balanced and informed conversations about religion and belief. Implicit within this, is the study of a range of religions, belief systems and worldviews, including opportunities for pupils to examine and evaluate connections between these ideas and the wider world, developing compassionate and respectful citizens.

How will we monitor the impact of our curriculum?

We strive to ensure that all children’s attainment in core and foundation subjects is in line with or exceeding their potential, based upon their varied starting points. The aim is that by the end of each year, the vast majority of pupils have achieved age related expectations, with some pupils having a greater depth of understanding. We track carefully throughout the year to ensure pupils are aiming to reach the expectations of our curriculum. Teaching staff will reflect on standards achieved against the planned outcomes and shape the onward curriculum accordingly. We monitor behaviours throughout school, ensuring that our children are well rounded individuals who care about others, their school community and take responsibility for their own actions, demonstrating our Christian values. Assessment data is shared with the whole school team and the governing body, providing a monitoring platform which supports challenge and ensures a strong evaluation of our impact.

Our Golden Threads

Our curriculum is driven by golden threads that provide a framework for learning and help deepen children’s understanding of what is being taught. These threads are ideas that work together to provide a link to the real world, helping children make sense of the world around them. The threads are revisited many times throughout the children’s time at All Saints, ensuring that they can build upon existing knowledge.

Alongside our golden threads run our Christian values and our school rules. This supports our school motto ‘Valuing Everyone, Growing Together’, ensuring that children develop holistically.

English and Maths