Woodcote Primary School

Through our aspirational approach to curriculum design, we express our belief that education should inspire, challenge and engage to create lasting memories. Our aim is to ensure children achieve as highly as possible, especially in the essential skills, whilst also providing ample opportunity for broadening their learning experiences.

Our aspirational approach permeates all we do in school. As well as encouraging intellectual growth, we work with families to develop the ‘whole child’. We are relentlessly bothered about ensuring every child has every possible opportunity to reach their personal best.

Our curriculum design also considers the development of character at each stage of education and how this enables pupils to flourish. We take pride in our culturally diverse community, ensuring that pupils see themselves reflected within the curriculum, and have opportunities to share with and learn from one another. We value each child as an individual and work hard to foster resilience, creativity, responsibility, self-belief, respect and truthfulness.

It follows that our curriculum has been carefully cultivated to:

• Make every day an ‘extraordinary school day’ for our pupils, through high quality lesson design that enables excellent teaching;
• provide opportunities for pupils to develop their character through our core character values: resilience, creativity, responsibility, self-belief, respect and truthfulness;
• ensure that pupils develop the core skills of Reading, Writing & Mathematics;
• provide opportunities to develop skills in Science and the foundation subjects, alongside a deep knowledge and understanding of the essential facts about our world, informed by the National Curriculum programmes of study and the Early Years Foundation Stage Framework.
• instil a cultural literacy that conveys British values;
• recognise the potential variation in cultural experiences amongst pupils: we provide enriched experiences that our pupils might not otherwise enjoy and learn from (for example, through our Pioneer Pupil Passport);
• involve parents and carers at every opportunity;
• extend pupils’ involvement in the local community and beyond, developing their understanding of local, environmental and global issues

Sequencing

We carefully consider the sequencing of skills and knowledge within each subject area, at each stage of education, and how these build toward agreed end points. Guided by our quality schemes of work, each subject’s curriculum is planned and sequenced so that new knowledge and skills build on those that have been taught before, ensuring progression towards the end of key stage expectations. We look at each concept and each skill, and ask ‘why this; why now?’. Opportunities for repetition and reinforcement are capitalised upon to ensure that pupils ‘know more and remember more’.  As a primary school with a Nursery, we are particularly well placed with our skilled Early Years practitioners to create very strong foundations in the EYFS. This ensures that we deliver a well sequenced learning journey across the primary phase, supported by consistency in the language of learning and the language for learning.

Adaptation

Our curriculum reflects the school’s local context by addressing typical gaps in pupils’ knowledge and skills. We are committed to recognising and meeting the needs of the following pupil groups:

• The number of pupils in school with English as an Additional Language (EAL).
• The number of pupils in school with Speech, Language and Communication needs (SLC).
• The number of pupils in school with Social Emotional and Mental Health needs (SEMH).
• Pupils in receipt of the Pupil Premium (PP)

Adapting our curriculum to respond to our school’s context involves considered selection of materials to interpret the National Curriculum - for example our adoption of the CUSP Curriculum in Key Stages 1 and 2. This provides a rich diet of language and vocabulary, emphasising oracy and vocabulary acquisition, use and retention to break down learning barriers and accelerate progress. We also considered our selection of experiences to supplement the National Curriculum (for example, our implementation of the ‘Pioneer Passport’) and the weaving of these experiences through our curriculum to create cultural capital, which we recognise as being significantly beneficial for our economically deprived pupils.

Curriculum adaptation at pupil level is indistinguishable from pedagogic adaptation and is a matter of implementation rather than intent. It is an ongoing dynamic process that modifies and adapts the prescribed programmes of study to meet the learning requirements of each pupil. It enables the teachers to teach learners of all abilities and ensures that every pupil is challenged.