At Consett Infant School, our vision is for the entire school community to be kind and respectful, resilient and happy. Being kind and respectful refers to being caring and sympathetic to one another whist showing respect for our individuality. Being resilient reflects our aim to promote resilience and appropriate risk-taking – not being afraid to make mistakes in our teaching, learning and parenting. Being happy represents our desire to teach, learn and experience things that make us happy, thus increasing our motivation and engagement.
Intent
Our entire curriculum stems from our vision. This encompasses the ability to be resilient, take risks, be independent and show determination and self-confidence, all of which are fundamental to learning at Consett Infant School. Threaded through our entire curriculum is the intention to expand and broaden the vocabulary that our children can use and understand, to enable them to become effective communicators both orally and in written form.
We intend to provide opportunities for all our children to challenge themselves through a broad and balanced curriculum, which gives equal weighting to all the foundation subjects. We will offer a range of fun, engaging and intellectually stimulating activities and experiences to extend those accessed by children out of school through lessons, trips, visitors and extra-curricular activities.
In addition to our curriculum intent, we have areas of focus, which are subject to change depending on the school improvement priorities at the time. These are a handful of significant areas for improvement, linked to our curriculum.
Implementation
Our curriculum is implemented in a way we feel will give all children the best opportunity to ensure changes are made to their long-term memory. Not only do we want to delivery intellectually stimulating learning, we want all learning to remain with the children as they progress through our school.
We have split our academic year into three terms: autumn, spring and summer, and in key stage 1 we have assigned a topic that links all foundation subjects for each term. Core subjects (Maths, English and Science) have additional themes that do not always link to the topic. It is through these key topics that the subject-specific programme of study from the National Curriculum will be taught, including non-National Curriculum content that we feel is important for children living in our community. We have worked as a whole staff team to plan each subject area to ensure the sequential progression of skills and vocabulary from Reception through to Year 2.
In Reception, we follow the Early Years Foundation Stage framework. The prime areas of learning (personal, social and emotional development, communication and language and physical development) are at the heart of our early years curriculum alongside the specific areas (literacy, mathematics, expressive arts and design, understanding of the world). We provide a varied and engaging programme of teaching and learning, and our continuous and enhanced provision enables the children to demonstrate the characteristics of effective learning.
Our Reception curriculum focuses on the key skills, concepts and knowledge that young learners need, which are revisited frequently throughout the year in line with the children’s needs. Input may be through whole class teaching, group work, work with individuals, through adult supporting within the continuous provision or enhancements made to the continuous provision through our “curiosity cube”.
Impact
All children will be exposed to high quality teaching and learning that contributes to deep learning and changes being made to their long-term memory.
We use three data collection points during each academic year for maths and English; one at the end of each term. We use an end of year collection point for foundation subjects and science. Progress in all subjects is tracked. For the foundation subjects, this is done against the knowledge and skills progression documents. As a school, we understand that deep learning takes place when subjects are revisited regularly. The children will be given the opportunity to apply their existing knowledge and skills in new and non-routine ways. New learning will be taught all the time whilst revisiting existing learning. In this way, learning will take place over an entire year (core subjects) or key stage (foundation subjects) enabling the children to revisit learning regularly whilst adding new ideas, knowledge and skills. Our ongoing assessment and knowledge of the children in our classes will ensure that we are fully aware of the children’s progress.