Our Curriculum

Intent

At Brookmans Park School we want our children to develop a love of life-long learning.  We follow the National Curriculum and underpin all learning with the development of the key principles of Building Learning Power (resilience, resourcefulness, reflectiveness, relationships and risk taking) to ensure that all our children are equipped with the learning habits to thrive in the 21st Century.

As we have a high proportion of children who attain highly, we have developed all our learning sequences to ensure that they are active, engaging, enriching and challenging.  We want to develop curious, confident and independent learners who are able to face difficulty and uncertainty calmly, confidently and creatively.

See our Curriculum Policy for further details

Aims

We aim to teach our pupils how to grow into positive, responsible people, who can work and co-operate with others while developing knowledge and skills, so that they make good or better progress and achieve great outcomes both personally and academically.

The aims of our curriculum are to:

• Promote good physical and mental health and well-being and an awareness of the importance of a healthy lifestyle.
• Promote high standards in reading, writing and mathematics.
• Enable children to be confident in the use of ICT
• Enable children to be aware of the importance of and participate in the arts and related cultural themes
• Promote spiritual development and enable pupils to develop moral sensibility through carefully taught values
• Provide equality of access to ensure all pupils make progress across all areas of the curriculum.

Implementation

Early Years

The Early Years follow the Foundation Stage Profile. We aim for all children to work towards the Early Learning Goals based upon the 7 areas of learning. We use the non-statutory framework ‘Development Matters’ to support our planning and teaching which is separated into:

Prime Areas

• Personal, Social, Emotional Development
• Communication and Language
• Physical Development

Specific Areas

• Literacy
• Maths
• Understanding of the World
• Expressive Arts and Design

A skills-based approach is used, teaching children’s skills and then providing them with opportunities to practise and apply these independently. We strive for all children to be independent learners through our enabling environments and enhancing our continuous provision. Our Topics are created through the children’s ideas and developed by the practitioners. We also have a Yearly Overview to support the progression of skills from Nursery to Reception.

The characteristics of effective learning underpin all 7 areas of learning. These are playing and exploring, active learning and thinking critically.

Throughout the rest of the school (Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2)

The Curriculum is planned effectively in Phases (Key Stage 1, Lower Key Stage 2 and Upper Key Stage 2) on a two-year rolling programme (see Appendix), providing continuity and progression across the school.  Over the two years, all of the National Curriculum is covered in each Phase.

Units of work from different subjects are carefully planned so that complimenting units are covered in conjunction with one another – this inter-disciplinary approach to teaching and learning ensures that children develop secure knowledge and skills.

Throughout the entire school (from Nursery to the end of Year 6)

Alongside the National Curriculum, we aim to develop a life-long love of learning through the following learning behaviours which are the key thematic drivers of our Curriculum:

• Resourcefulness – being ready, willing and able to learn in different ways; using both internal and external resources effectively; calling on different ways of learning as appropriate
• Resilience – being ready, willing and able to lock onto learning; knowing how to work through difficulties when the pressure mounts or the going gets tough
• Relationships – being ready, willing and able to learn alone or with other people; using a sense of independent judgement together with skills of communication and empathy
• Reflectiveness – being ready, willing and able to become more strategic about learning; taking a longer-term view by planning, taking stock and drawing out your experiences as a learner to get the best out of yourself
• Risk Taking – being ready, willing and able to have a go at a challenging task; pushing yourself out of your comfort zone to try something new, difficult or different

Teaching staff enthuse the children and broaden their experiences through the ‘WOW’ factor e.g. off-site visits, visitors into school and shared experiences of the wider school community.

Lessons provide challenging and enriching activities to enable pupils to make connections across different areas of learning, helping pupils to think creatively to solve problems while developing a broad range of knowledge, skills and understanding.

Lessons are active and engaging, promoting the building of relationships through partnering or group work and provide pupils with opportunities to work collaboratively.

The use of Fast Feedback, for example check it stations, toolkits and reflection opportunities, promotes independent resourcefulness and reflectiveness (see our Fast Feedback Policy, which can be requested from our office, for further information).

Childrens’ achievements are celebrated regularly in the school through displays in classrooms and shared areas and in assemblies/performances where children are encouraged to share their knowledge with the rest of the school and their parents.