Curriculum intent at Repton Primary School

How does our curriculum fit in with our aims and ethos?

As with our curriculum, we also spent a considerable amount of time shaping our ethos and values. The overwhelming themes and values that came out from our work with the whole school community were around Respect, Pride and Success. This became vital to us when we planned and designed our curriculum ensuring that these values were prominent throughout it. All our pupils will have the opportunity to show respect within the curriculum; take pride in everything they do in the curriculum and above all be successful. Having these values at the heart of our curriculum was fundamental when we planned it.

How did we design our curriculum?

We spent a considerable amount of time designing our curriculum and after analysing our parental surveys and questionnaires we dedicated staff CPD and INSET sessions to ensuring that we met the needs, wishes and desires of all key stakeholders. Our staff were given time to be creative and imaginative to develop a curriculum that is unique to our school whilst covering National Curriculum objectives.

How does our curriculum meet the needs of our pupils?

Our curriculum has been carefully designed, planned and organised to ensure breadth, balance and depth for every learner in our school. Our pupils’ backgrounds, life and cultural experiences are important to help us to design a curriculum that meets their needs.

Our curriculum is tailored and personalised to ensure that every child is engaged, inspired and challenged. Curriculum responsibilities have been shared among staff so that we utilise their individual strengths and interests ensuring that there is expertise in the leadership of all subjects. In addition, we have a whole school approach to the spiritual, cultural and moral development of pupils to make the world a better place. We believe a curriculum is about broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilisations.

At Repton Primary School it is our underlying belief that every child should feel valued and experience the feeling of success in a wide range of curriculum areas. We have designed, organised and planned our curriculum to ensure every child receives an appropriate mix of academic and personal development, which means in practice our curriculum places equal importance on core and foundation subjects.

We place priority on ensuring children’s physical and mental well-being are met. We understand that children will not be successful learners unless they are emotionally secure, therefore we designed our curriculum and adopted a flexible approach to timetabling to ensure we can meet and respond to any issues that arise.

Implementation

How do pupils progress and achieve within our curriculum?

At Repton Primary School, our definition of progress is; the widening and deepening of essential knowledge and skills, through the altering of long term memory where pupils know more, remember more and can do more.  Our curriculum is designed to ensure that pupils are not merely covering content but achieving a depth to their learning which enables them to use their skills and understanding in all areas of the curriculum. We moved away from filling pupils with isolated 'buckets' of knowledge in a 'content' based curriculum to more developing a pupil's schema so links can be made with prior and current learning in other parts of the curriculum. Our careful curriculum design and planning means that we build in many opportunities for repetition and practise for essential skills, knowledge and understanding in every subject. This ensures that children can revisit previous learning, which allows them to gradually develop a deeper understanding of the skills and processes within subjects, at their own pace and in the best possible way for each individual child.

Our curriculum is meticulously designed and planned to move the nature of children’s thinking to a higher order, deep level of understanding, rather than just acquiring new facts and knowledge. Some of our subjects use a scheme to deliver the curriculum which are always matched to the National Curriculum. Some of these are – Kapow in Art and Computing, Charanga in Music and PSHE Matters for PSHE. In maths, teachers plan learning through The White Rose Maths which helps organise the sequence of learning from the National Curriculum objectives. With all of these schemes it is the responsibility of the subject leaders to ensure that the scheme is progressive across all year groups from EY to Y6 and that the learning is sequenced and matched to the National Curriculum.

How will we evaluate our curriculum?

We pride ourselves in constantly improving our school and value feedback from all stakeholders. We give our parents and governors many opportunities to share and celebrate the outcomes of our curriculum. All classes have a governor who, along with parents, will be invited into a half-termly celebration of topics where pupils will showcase their outcomes. Class pages on the school website will also inform parents of the half-termly topic for their class. Class pages are updated every week so parents can see exactly what their child has been learning that week. An important aspect of our curriculum is providing pupils with a 'wow' experience.  Our staff plan exciting educational visits which ‘hook’ and inspire pupils into their learning during the term. In all of this we will ask for feedback from all stakeholders and senior leaders will monitor and evaluate the impact that our curriculum is having on learning.

Impact

What has been the impact of our curriculum?

In terms of Maths and English the impact of our curriculum on outcomes has been very positive. Outcomes for pupils in Early years and the proportion of those achieving a Good Level of Development  was above national expectations. Indeed, this was also mirrored in Key Stage One with a greater proportion of pupils achieving above national expectations in Reading, Writing and Maths. By the end of their time at our school, pupils leave with outcomes that are above national expectations with pupils achieving greater depth in some subjects above national averages. There are cross-curricular links to English and Maths within our curriculum and staff consider this when planning topics. As a result, we have high expectations that pupils will continue to make good progress in English and Maths through our exciting curriculum at Repton Primary School. Regular subject book looks indicate that outcomes in books are in line with subject leaders' intent and demonstrate high expectations for their subjects. Regular pupil discussions always demonstrate that pupils are learning key component skills and knowledge and can relate learning to a wider subject schema where prior learning has been built on to help them know more and remember more. 

If you have any questions or would like to learn more about our curriculum, please don’t hesitate to contact Mr Tague at school or if your question is about your child’s curriculum then please contact your child’s class teacher.

   Who leads each area of the curriculum?