Our Curriculum Intent

Our curriculum will give children the opportunity to explore the breadth and depth of the national curriculum, but with focus on developing communication and language skills. In particular, we use a text rich curriculum, as we know that this builds imagination and can take you on a journey of exploration. We want our children to experience the challenge and enjoyment of learning. Our curriculum is planned annually to take into account the needs of our children who are at the heart of all we do across the federation.

We understand that many of our children have limited experiences of life outside of our small communities and we therefore plan to have a memorable experience at the start of the topic. We feel raising aspirations of our children is vital; we do this through curriculum enhancement and developing partnerships with external providers – to further extend children’s opportunities and improve their cultural capital. We also feel that encouraging parents to become engaged and involved in their child’s learning is essential. Our curriculum provides high expectations and high aspirations for all of our children.

While we use a thematic curriculum, we are keen that progression in individual subjects is well planned for. We use a progression document for all subjects to ensure this happens. We ensure our curriculum is knowledge rich and are developing knowledge organisers to provide the non-negotiable knowledge in each year group to allow our children to master the curriculum, retain knowledge and build upon prior knowledge and skills. Our teachers create their long-term plans each year; this ensures that children in mixed aged classes do not repeat content and their skills and knowledge are developed.

We use the national curriculum as a starting point for our curriculum design.

School specific drivers for our curriculum:

HSM	GDE	Westmere
Language and Oracy Develop Independence Raise Aspirations and Cultural Capital Broad, balanced and beyond Church School distinctiveness	Language and Oracy Develop Independence Raise Aspirations and Cultural Capital Broad, balanced and beyond Personal and social development	Language and Oracy Personal development and behaviour Raise Aspirations and Cultural Capital Broad, balanced and beyond Community