Our Curriculum

Curriculum

INTENT STATEMENT

Our vision for The Icknield Primary School is that we build a culture in which every member of the school community gains a sense of belonging, enabling all to ‘thrive and achieve together’. We want to help all of our children to be the best that they can be. We believe that children thrive when they are happy, motivated, growing and successful.

At The Icknield, we believe that our children deserve a curriculum that is rooted in rich learning experiences that develop knowledge and skills. We recognise that for many of our pupils to aspire to strive academically and in the wider areas of their lives, they need to be given rich and sustained opportunities to develop their cultural capital. Using the National Curriculum alongside selected schemes of work, we offer the children lots of opportunity for hands-on practical experiences as well as offering valuable cross-curricular links. We have designed a curriculum which places at its heart our school values: caring, honest, inclusive, ambitious, resilient, unique and creative.

The curriculum has been carefully designed: new knowledge is presented in a well-ordered and logical way and links are made across a single year group and through a spiral delivery across years groups and curriculum areas. Our curriculum exceeds National Curriculum requirements; it is relevant to our pupils, draws on local resources, and is enhanced by visits and extra-curricular activities.

It is our aim for every class, every year, to visit the locality by foot, Cambridge (and other locations just beyond the village) by public bus, and to travel further to locations such as the seaside and London. Year 6 pupils also have the opportunity to go on a residential visit. We enhance our curriculum with an exciting and broad range of opportunities for personal development across the school years. These include an impressive variety of extra-curricular clubs, including different sports, inter-school competitions and tournaments. We welcome visiting specialists and workshops relating to STEM, careers and the performing arts. We are continually developing our school grounds and resources such as the school gardening area, to support the curriculum, as well as celebrating special occasions and festivals with assemblies, school fayres, themed days or weeks, school concert and productions, special meals and fund-raising events.

We are conscious of the need to avoid overloading pupils’ working memory and aim to build long-term memory with questions, knowledge, examples, stories, analogies, practice, mnemonics, and hard work. We have a strong emphasis on securing foundational knowledge and skills in EYFS and Key Stage 1, whilst encouraging curiosity and exploration in line with our values.

IMPLEMENTATION

Our curriculum drivers are:

• Oracy – to place speech and communication at the heart of our curriculum enabling our children to speak confidently, appropriately and sensitively, learning through talk and deepening understanding through dialogue.
• Diversity – to develop our children’s appreciation and understanding of a variety of cultures and lifestyles, engendering equity and challenging bias
• Community – to see ourselves as an integral part of the local, national and global community
• Environment – to foster a passion for both the local and global environment and take responsibility for its care
• Enquiry – to encourage our children to be inquisitive, to ask questions and be resourceful. Our children will be persistent and independent in their learning.
• Risk – To encourage our children to learn to assess and manage risks by having fun and stepping outside their comfort zones
• Enterprise – to support our children in developing more independence and the opportunity to show initiative.

Curriculum development is a core part of what we do at The Icknield Primary School and is a constantly evolving process based upon shared leadership and targeted reflection. All teachers in the school have a role to play in the development and evolution of our curriculum. We strive to ensure that our children get the best education possible, including a keen emphasis on listening to pupil voice to understand what the children think about what and how they are learning.
Strong subject knowledge is vital for staff to be able to deliver a highly effective and robust curriculum. Each scheme of work focuses on the key subject knowledge needed to deliver the curriculum, making links with prior learning and identifying possible misconceptions. Our schemes ensure teachers are able to identify gaps in learning and to develop responsive, adaptive teaching to accelerate pupil progress and fill the gaps. Assessment for Learning (AfL) opportunities are built in for pupils to revisit prior learning from previous year groups and lessons and knowledge retention (through retention practice) is key and there are plentiful opportunities for pupils to revisit previous learning.

Our Curriculum Map shows coverage of content, via units of work, for each year group in each subject. This is broken down into individual subject curriculum overviews. Each of these is supported by a Subject Progression of Learning showing the progressive knowledge and skills covered in each unit of work for each year group. Each of our curriculum subjects has a Curriculum Statement describing the intent, implementation and impact of each area on the development of our pupils.

Parents and carers are informed of knowledge, skills, key vocabulary and resources, such as texts to be studied, via termly curriculum letters. Each year begins with an opportunity to ‘Meet the Teacher’ when curriculum information and expectations for each year group are shared and discussed with parents and carers.

IMPACT

As a result of a carefully designed curriculum, most pupils make secure connections between the different subjects and topics that they study. They leave as knowledgeable, confident learners who are able to build on their foundational understanding and successes. They are able to express themselves and communicate orally and are numerate and literate. They know how to keep themselves safe, are well prepared for the next step of their education and ready to grow into responsible members of society. They know how to protect their physical and mental health and are sufficiently resilient to have high expectations of themselves and aspirations for the future. They celebrate their differences and diversity in heritage, beliefs and ways of living within their own community and the wider world.