Curriculum Intent

Our curriculum is designed with the following in mind: 

1. It is valued

2. Knowledge is specified and taught to be remembered

3. Coherent 

4. Cumulative 

5. Academically challenging 

We aim to equip our learners with the knowledge and skills they need, enabling them to be ambitious about all they can be within their lives, challenge themselves to achieve and celebrate success in a way that demonstrates respect for themselves, their family, their friends, their community and the world within which they live.

Being a church school is important to us and Christian values underpin all that we do within both our learning and play. The atmosphere and ethos of the school reflects that it is a community which collaborates to improve; shows courage and resilience in order to aim higher; and who demonstrate compassion for, and belief in each other, the church and a love for learning. 

Our staff all share an ambitious vision of what we want our pupils to achieve from our aspirational curriculum and how we can go about achieving this.  Our curriculum design has been greatly impacted by the desire to aim higher for our children and families.  The long-term curriculum plan demonstrates a coherent, sequenced, curriculum where knowledge is specified, that builds both within a year and across year groups, starting right from the beginning, with our first class, Reception, who access an ambitious EYFS curriculum that is underpinned by seven key areas of learning and builds broad and solid foundations in preparation for achieving success and readiness for their future learning. 

The KS1 and KS2 curriculum, is primarily based upon the National curriculum and is rich in knowledge of many different aspects of the world around them and promotes development of skills that they will need to lead a full and active life within the world they live.  All children access our curriculum offer, appropriate adaptations are made where needed to enable our children with special educational needs to access every aspect.

We aim to equip our learners with the knowledge and skills they need, enabling them to aspire to all they can achieve within their lives, challenge themselves to achieve and these celebrate success in a way that demonstrates respect for themselves, their family, their friends, their community and the world within which they live.

Curriculum implementation

Within each subject we deliver learning using recommended, respected and tested, subject specific schemes of work and curricula as starting points and develop these to reflect the locality our children live in.  We believe in a living curriculum that is adapting to the needs of our learners and our ambition for them.

The school implements each curriculum so that key concepts and knowledge is revisited with children throughout their time at St Botolph’s. Learning is broken down into chunks of learning to ensure progression and development of substantive (what we know) and disciplinary knowledge (how we know) and, allowing for previous learning to be built upon when embarking on new areas of learning.

Impact 

Termly assessment is carried out in line with the DEMAT timetable:

Reading – DIBELS 

Writing – judgement, and involvement in No More Marking 

Maths – Headstart assessments and Complete Maths online testing

Reading and Spelling Ages should also be done termly.

Yr 1 Phonics checks / Yr2 SATs – termly

Yr6 SATs – half termly 

YrR Baseline Assessment – Autumn term 

Statutory Assessments (May/ June) – EYFS assessments, Yr1 Phonics Checks, Yr2 SATs, Yr4 Multiplication Checks, Yr6 SATs

Subject leaders are provided with time to monitor the impact of our curriculum regularly through lesson drop ins, discussions with children about their work and by looking at reviews of units taught made by teachers. 

Curriculum Communication with Parents

Each half-term an overview of the learning being covered will be shared with parents via the website, this will include key facts, questions, vocabulary and learning that each class will cover.

Homework

In appreciating the importance of home/school links and the necessity for parents and school to work together in ensuring a good education for our pupils, we believe it is important that children regularly take work home. Homework enables parents to take an interest in the learning process.

Children will be expected to engage with homework set by the class teacher, this will take the form of: weekly reading, phonics/spelling, times tables facts, Complete Maths Tutor (from  practise and for KS2 an English task.