Curriculum Overview for 2023-24

 

Aims and Intent

With its diverse demographic, the school recognises that an international, engaging, challenging and integrated curriculum is key to supporting outstanding teaching and learning. Our curriculum aims to give all the children the knowledge, skills and understanding to achieve their full potential academically, socially and emotionally. This takes place in the context of a safe and nurturing school environment where each individual child is known and each individual child’s learning journey is unique to them. We aim to give the children the necessary skills to prepare them for life in modern British Society. 

We aim for our curriculum to reflect both the context of the school and the experiences of the children and the wider world in which we live. This enables the children to be aspirational, to fulfil their potential and reach the highest of expectations that we have of them- to embody a Growth Mindset. 

Our priority is to enable the children to succeed in the 21st century by providing a rich, relevant and exciting curriculum. In doing so, the children will develop a lifelong love of learning. Reading for information and pleasure, writing for different purposes, being able to apply their mathematical skills to real life situations, being able to explain, analyse and persuade is at the heart of what we do. 

Our approach to delivering a knowledge and enquiry based curriculum ensures that we fully implement the National Curriculum. We follow a variety of well evidenced schemes of work, including Talk for Writing, Maths Mastery, Jigsaw, and Kapow for most wider curriculum subjects. 

Implementation

Alongside the detailed planning provided by Kapow, we use subject specific ‘Knowledge Organisers’; informed by our curriculum intent along with the National Curriculum 2014. They are progressive and develop the learners at their key stages. They build upon previous learning and allow all pupils to understand and see what it looks like to improve in a subject. Key knowledge, skills and vocabulary is learned, retained and recalled through each enquiry. This is regularly checked using retrieval practice techniques. Each lesson will have an enquiry question as a learning objective, where short or long enquiry types are addressed in all lessons.  CPD led internally and externally will support the security of subject specific teacher knowledge and understanding so that they can make connections and links with both prior and future learning. School learning environments will reflect our curriculum intent through subject specific displays.

Impact

We use a variety of strategies to evaluate children’s knowledge, skills and understanding. Subject assessments are tracked via ongoing formative assessment and termly summative assessments via Target Tracker. EYFS, Year 1 (phonics), Year 2 and Year 6 are assessed against national assessments. Other strategies to track the progress of our children against our curriculum include:

  • Regular feedback, marking and pupil voice feedback. 
  • Subject monitoring, including book looks. 
  • Pre-learning and Post-learning tasks to measure progress through a unit
  • Multiple Choice Questionnaires (MCQ’s)
  • Regular retrieval practice, using a range of creative approaches. 
  • Reflection times for pupils to respond to marking and have dedicated verbal feedback from teachers. 
  • Cross-school moderation to ensure secure teacher judgements.
  • CPD to ensure that teacher pedagogy and assessment is secure.

Thomas's Academy Curriculum Map