Curriculum

Our curriculum provides children with a rich, broad and balanced learning experience. It is based on The National Curriculum. Much of our curriculum is organised in topics. Each topic has a specific trip or experience. The knowledge, skills and experiences that children acquire in the topics they study when younger are built on later. Our topic overview can be seen by clicking here. This topic overview is just that, an overview of our two year rolling topic programme. We write detailed topic plans each term and these can be seen below. Some of these plans refer to resources which we have bought and thus can’t be placed on our website.

Intent

It is our vision that our curriculum gives our children the very best experiences here to enable them to grow and develop as rounded individuals. Further, that they have a wide and deep knowledge and can use and apply this in each subject and area in life.

Implementation

We work towards achieving the vision we have for our curriculum in a range of ways. These include:

• Subject specific lessons such as English, mathematics and Religious Education.
• Topic related lessons. Our phase termly newsletters has details of what is being taught and when.
• Physical Education lessons.
• Theme days in school.
• Visits out of school and visitors into school. Visits include day trips and residential ones.
• Participation and involvement in and with our local community. For example, our involvement with Remembrance each year and our work with the elderly in our community.
• Extra curricular clubs. Please see the clubs information on our website for information about our current clubs.
• Opportunities for children to experience responsibility and play and active role in the running of our school. For example, Prefects, Play Leaders and School Councillors.
• Activities with children from other schools. For example, sporting events and our trust’s annual Cathedral day.

Impact

The most important impact our curriculum can have is two fold:

1. It enables our children to be safe.
2. It enables our children to be ready for their next stage of their education and life beyond this.

We are able to measure aspects of this. For example, we use statutory assessments and the progress children make to measure the impact of our English and mathematics curriculum. We also measure the progress children make in other subjects, using our own tracking system.

Other aspects of our curriculum it is almost impossible to ‘measure with number’. The feedback from children, from parents and our own observations, show that children value the experiences we give them and that they help the children to learn and to grow in confidence, maturity and independence.

We keep the implementation and impact of our curriculum under constant review. We do this through our ongoing monitoring and evaluation work. The outcomes of this are used by us to adjust our curriculum.

We provide the information below so that parents and carers can see detailed information about our curriculum and how we approach the teaching of it.

Our Worship

We gather each day for a time of collective worship. Most of our worship times together are of a broadly Christian nature and reflect our Christian foundation and Anglican basis. We plan our worship times carefully. Our vicar leads our Monday worship each fortnight. Staff lead the other ones. In worship on a Friday we celebrate our achievements and thank God for his help in enabling us to do all that we can. The achievements celebrate all the different ways that our children grow and develop; including Religious Education – each week our Prefects even choose a Golden Award for a child to receive.  As part of our worship we pray our thanks and our requests to God. We also pray for other schools in our trust.

Our times of worship supports the spiritual development of our children and the spirituality of our children. They are part of the worship that occurs within our parish.

Our Religious Education (RE) curriculum

The teaching of RE is important to us and to our children. We use the Essex Agreed Syllabus and high quality resources such as Understanding Christianity. The majority of our RE curriculum is focused on Christianity. The other part of our curriculum enables our children to learn about a number of other world faiths. The whole of our RE curriculum supports our children to live successfully and in harmony in Britain as it is now and as it changes.