Curriculum

Curriculum principles

Vision

At Grange Community Junior School we recognise that improving educational outcomes is the biggest way we can positively impact our pupils’ futures. We take the term ‘education’ in its most broad sense: this means more than just a set of results. It includes a child’s social and emotional development, citizenship and responsibility, happiness and success. We aim for this vision alongside our school values to be integrated into way teachers develop the curriculum and the way pupils experience it. We aim for our curriculum to be true to subjects’ core content and concepts, develop a love of lifelong learning, and create beautiful work, expertise, fascination and wonder.

Our school values

Respect, integrity, teamwork, pride, participation, resilience and hard work.

Aspirational and future focused

We want our curriculum to demonstrate the richness of the world we live in to our pupils. It should broaden their horizons and equip them with the knowledge they need so they can achieve in life.

We aim to provide our pupils with knowledge, experiences and role models that can raise their aspirations, giving them a new perspective.  We aim to lift our pupils out of their familiar context and gain the kind of perspective that comes from encountering new and different situations.

We want our curriculum to prepare children fully for the next phase of their education by ensuring that they have the knowledge appropriate for the end of Key Stage 2.

Ultimately, we aim for our curriculum to inspire the artists/designers, musicians, technicians, scientists, linguists, mathematicians and sportsmen and women of the future.

Rationale

The rationale behind our curriculum includes:

• A continuous focus on literacy, numeracy as core areas across the whole curriculum
• A focus on the disciplinary skills our learners are developing in different subjects
• A broad general education including blocks of work in topics based on experiences and outcomes.
• A progression through the experiences and outcomes that is consistent with all pupils learning needs and prior learning.
• Allowing pupils to contribute to the ethos and life of the school community.
• Providing opportunities for personal achievement and supports all learners in developing skills for learning, life and work.
• A focus upon building health and well-being to support our children to be resilient, sociable learners who develop and maintain healthy attitudes
• Teaching our pupils how to learn and be successful in school
• All learners having opportunities to work together as a school community.

We organise our Curriculum Experiences into contexts for learning which include:

• Curriculum subjects
• Learning skills
• Opportunities for personal achievement
• Ethos and life of the school

 Principles

Our curriculum principles are the values we believe will give our children the best chance of succeeding, and what we know to be right, given our local context. With our principles we aim to align how children learn, what children learn and teaching pedagogy. Our curriculum is based upon these principles:

Balanced: A curriculum that incorporates all aspects of the National Curriculum and promotes pupils spiritual, moral, social, cultural emotional and creative development.

Rigorous: A curriculum that develops pupils learning to learn habits alongside the acquisition of new knowledge and skills.

Coherent: A curriculum that makes links between different subjects.

Progressive: A curriculum that sequences knowledge and provides a clear pathway to what getting better at each subject looks like.

Focused: A curriculum that identifies the big ideas/key concepts with a subject.

Appropriate for all pupils: A curriculum that is both inclusive and provides challenge.

Relevant: A curriculum that is specifically relevant to our pupils.

Principle	How we achieve it at Grange
Balanced	We cover the full scope of the National Curriculum but our school curriculum will offer opportunities for learning beyond this where we deem it relevant and interesting to our pupils. We teach all subjects across all year groups. Each subject is valued and we work hard to ensure the integrity of each subject is preserved. It is our intention that all subjects have a place in their own right and as part of the cultural capital that education should bring. Opportunities for speaking and listening are built in to units of learning, particularly through Lets Think English. We aim to develop our pupils’ vocabulary (spoken and written) to enable them to access ever more demanding texts as readers. In addition, we want our curriculum to prepare pupils to live full and active lives as part of their community into adulthood.  In order to produce happy, fulfilled and compassionate citizens of the world, we aim to weave all elements of spiritual, moral, social and cultural learning and development (SMSC) into our  practice. Pupils’ social development is a key focus at Grange – we want our pupils to be able to use a range of social skills in different contexts and with people from different ethnic, religious and socio-economic backgrounds. We believe that happy, well-rested and healthy children will learn more effectively and we will do everything we can to support pupils and parents in this regard. Our curriculum will educate our pupils on what it means to be healthy in both body and mind, particularly through PE, PHSE, RE and parts of Science. Over their time at Grange, we want to see our pupils’ independence increase steadily so they have the capacity to be more reflective and responsible for their own learning. To support personal development of pupils, our curriculum also includes a range of first hand experiences through monthly societies. These provide opportunities for children to work as a group in their preferred choice of enrichment activities.
Coherent	With so much information to learn we aim to make the content of the curriculum structured so that links are made to previous learning to enhance the building of schema in the long-term memory.  We weave in key knowledge, vocabulary and skills throughout the curriculum to allow pupils to make links and consolidate learnt material to long-term memory. We see our curriculum as continuous, regularly revisiting key concepts and providing practice to develop fluency. For example in history, historical significance will be revisited in  lower school to upper school, but connections made, for example how the Romans were significant to history in year 4 and how the Greeks were significant to history in Year 6. To build pupils subject knowledge we aim to have lessons which engage and inspire, this might include videos, role play, study of artefacts, low stakes quizzes to help pupils to embed new skills and knowledge as they go through the school. Through  motivating contexts pupils see the links between different aspects of learning within and across subject areas There is coherence and consistency in the development of literacy, numeracy health and wellbeing Staff promote coherence in learning by using their overview of learning across the curriculum and their flexible approach to time management
Rigorous	The curriculum is taught through discrete subjects organised into learning journeys/pathways, which develop conceptual understanding. Where there are meaningful links between subject areas that will help to build schema, a thematic approach is used. A whole school curriculum map shows the subjects that are taught across each term and the whole academic year and indicates themes as appropriate. We will provide consistent opportunities for pupils to develop growth mind-sets – focused on resilience, celebrating mistakes, taking inspiration from others and being responsive to feedback. We will weave Building Learning Power (BLP) through all areas of the curriculum.
Progressive	Pupils are taught specific knowledge and skills in all subject areas following each subject’s curriculum, building towards clear end-points by the end of Key Stage 2. Each subject’s curriculum is planned and sequenced so that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before. We aim for our curriculum to address typical gaps in pupils’ knowledge and skills. Waypoints or objectives set out what pupils need to know about the current topic in order to understand and succeed in the next topic. These waypoints are also a means of assessing pupils’ progress. Formative assessment evidence is actively used to allow teachers to make professional judgements about pupils’ progress. This will inform when they are ready for the challenge of new and stimulating learning contexts

Focused	At the centre of our curriculum are the core subjects of English, Maths and science.  Our wider curriculum, covering all other National Curriculum subjects is organised into learning pathways or journeys, which develop conceptual understanding. The curriculum is taught through discrete subjects organised into learning journeys, which develop conceptual understanding. Where possible topics are focused around a big question or big idea/concept. Where there are meaningful links between subject areas that will help to build schema, a thematic approach is used. A whole school curriculum map shows the subjects that are taught across each term and the whole academic year and indicates themes as appropriate. Our aim is that children have a growing bank of knowledge, which they can apply, consider, weigh, analyse, evaluate, create and adapt as they grow. We want children to be wise not just well informed. We want our children to have experiences in history, geography, French etc that will grow their minds, give them the skills of historians, geographers, linguists etc.  We seek to grow their cultural capital.
Appropriate for all	At Grange we have the moto ‘where everyone counts’, this is a key part of our curriculum.  All pupils learn all subjects, there is no narrowing of the curriculum. We are aware of the barriers to learning at Grange, particularly the lack of previous experience and often low levels of literacy and numeracy. Our aim is for our curriculum to reach all learners, regardless of their starting points.  Our curriculum is designed so it is flexible enough to be accessible for all and at the same time providing challenging. In the learning materials teachers prepare, we aim for it to contain a level of cognitive challenge, but with scaffolding to allow access for all. High challenge, low threat sums up our approach. Where possible tasks will be open ended to allow for growth. Staff have realistic, high expectations of what pupils can achieve Activities are suitably challenging, engaging and motivating, encouraging high aspirations and ambitions for all pupils Planning within the experiences and outcomes focuses on creating opportunities for pupils to actively engage in learning Tasks selected may be differentiated or scaffolded to present an appropriate challenge for all pupils Resources are developed or selected to promote active learning and are relevant to pupils needs and the school / community context Activities promote opportunities to develop and demonstrate creativity Pupils have opportunities to overcome challenges and achieve success There are opportunities for personal achievement across a range of different contexts.
Relevant	We want our curriculum to spark curiosity in our pupils and foster their love of learning, but we know that pupils will learn best if the new learning relates to them in some way.   Where possible we aim to ‘show’ pupils how this new body of information has relevance  to their own lives. We aim to open pupils’ eyes to the world in which they live and build on this further to learn more about the world in which they are less familiar. We make the most of our local area and local experts who add further depth to the learning, for example in History we learn about our locality and its connections to national and world links. In year 3 pupils find out about royal connections to the locality and year 5 find out about connections to the development of aircraft. Trips and visitors are planned in to link to and enhance learning. We take advantage of specific geographical features of our location where they lend themselves to topics. In Geography we learn about Farnborough, and the UK before learning about the wider world.  In science we make use of our grounds to learn about the birds and animals in our own environment. As so many of our pupils have links to Nepal we also learn about Nepal in a variety of ways. The curriculum content connects with the child’s experience, learning and interests in and beyond the school environment Staff use their in-depth knowledge of the whole child during learning and teaching to inform and shape contexts for learning Pupils see connections how their learning relates to everyday life in their family, local community and the world of work.

 

Learning skills

Metacognition describes the processes involved when learners plan, monitor, evaluate and make changes to their own learning behaviours. Our curriculum is underpinned with opportunities to highlight ‘learning powers’. Throughout the curriculum teachers, exemplify the traits of an effective learner through Building Learning Power.

We use the vehicle of Lets Think in English (LTE) to enhance thinking skills. This is a set of largely oral-based lessons where open-ended questioning and structured group discussion increase pupils’ reasoning skills and structured reflection. This heightens pupil awareness of their own thinking.

Schemes of work

English and Maths Planning is completed in detail as Unit Plans which clearly identify the Learning Objectives, differentiation for both ‘catch up’ and extension opportunities. We mainly follow the Hampshire Maths curriculum.

Units of work in the Foundation Subjects are planned, usually of a half term duration. These are called medium term plans and contain the detail of the work to be covered.  The plans also indicate resources what the pupil outcomes will be. Each subject area also has a progression of learning objectives. Some subject areas have started with a brought in scheme, although this scheme is adapted to meet the needs of Grange Junior School pupils.

• The MFL (French) scheme we follow is Primary Languages Network.
• The RE scheme of work follows the Hampshire Agreed Syllabus: Living Difference IV.
• The PE scheme of work we use is Get Set 4 PE.
• The DT scheme of work we use is Kapow.
• The Phonics scheme we use is predominantly following Twinkl Phonics and Twinkl Catch up as required.

Opportunities to contribute to the ethos and life of the school as a community

Opportunities for children to participate responsibly in decision making, to contribute as leaders and role models and play an active role in putting the values of the school community into practice.

• Pupil Council, Environmental society, House captains, JRSO
• Year 2 into year 3 Buddies
• Pupil notices board
• School Newsletter
• Roles and responsibilities within the classroom and the wider school environment
• Playground leaders organise playground activities for younger children
• Gardening society maintaining school gardens
• Litter picks within school and the wider community
• Working to support our local community- Tea, Coffee and Cake Morning, fundraising events
• Pupil Voice planning for improvement
• Shared writing and reading opportunities across whole school
• Enterprise projects involving local community – Christmas / Summer Fayre
• Opportunities for transition pupils attend events with children from cluster group to build readiness for secondary school
• Make it real (World of Work) in year 5
• House Captains and house challenge days
• Achievement Awards presented at assemblies
• Attendance awards
• Cluster sports tournaments e.g Cross Country, football
• Celebrating personal achievement with the wider community through school newsletters
• Achievements in and out of school shared in the school newsletter
• Sharing children’s successes and progress with parents/carers through showcases of learning, assemblies special certificate awards
• Year 6 Residential Trip
• School Choir
• After school clubs

 

Department of Education: Education catch up Scheme

Please see the following link for information on the

Education catch up scheme.

DfE Education catch up for your child

Religious Education