Curriculum

Basic Principles – What is Learning?   

Learning is a process. 

We understand that learning is a change to long-term memory. 

We accept that learning cannot be observed in the here and now. The only way to see if something has been retained over time and transferred to a new context is to look at what students can do elsewhere and later. Cognitive development happens gradually and by increments. 

Our aims are to ensure that our students experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of knowledge. 

Our Curriculum Intent Model

Identifying our Curriculum Drivers

Curriculum drivers shape our curriculum breadth. They are derived from an exploration of the backgrounds of our students, our beliefs about high quality education and our values. They are used to ensure we give our students appropriate and ambitious curriculum opportunities.  The Curriculum Drivers which underpin and shape our Curriculum at Sytchampton are Resilience, Risk Taking and Independence.

Cultural Capital

Cultural capital gives our students the vital background knowledge required to be informed and thoughtful members of our community who understand and believe in British values.  Our community lacks diversity and it is important that our Curriculum at Sytchampton allows our pupils to explore the diverse world around them, considering a range of different cultures, beliefs, disabilities and relationships.  Our pupils also need to develop resilience and have the courage to take measured risks.

Curriculum Breadth

Curriculum breadth is shaped by our curriculum drivers, cultural capital, subject topics and our ambition for students to study the best of what has been thought and said by many generations of academics and scholars.  We ensure that all of our pupils have equal access to all subject areas throughout their time at Sytchampton.

 Our Curriculum Design

Rationale

We have considered a range of Cognitive Learning research before considering how to design our curriculum.   Consequently, we decided that our curriculum should be designed to help our pupils form a schema within their long-term memories. 

Schema theory states that all knowledge is organised into units and is a conceptual system for understanding and organising knowledge in a meaningful way.

A schema is distinct from information, which is just isolated facts that have no organisational basis or links.  We have developed a curriculum which:

• Uses Threshold Concepts as the basis for the schema
• Strengthens the schema with knowledge
• Deepens connections 

Threshold Concepts

Threshold concepts are the ‘Big Ideas’ that underpin a subject. 

Threshold concepts tie together the subject topics into meaningful schema, thereby enabling pupils to retain knowledge in the long term.  The same concepts are then explored in a wide breadth of topics.  Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, students return to the same concepts over and over and gradually build understanding of them over time.

Progression of Threshold Concepts

For all subject areas, we have mapped out the progression of skills and knowledge for each Threshold Concept.

Learning Lenses

We have developed Learning Lenses for most of our foundation subjects.  These are effectively the knowledge categories in each subject.  These are referred to explicitly within our lessons.

Our Learning Lenses are the facets of each Threshold Concept and these lenses help to strengthen the schema.  

In every subject where lenses have been developed, one of learning lenses is key vocabulary, which is taught explicitly and then embedded across the learning sequence and referred to frequently.  

The Spiral Curriculum

The Spiral Curriuclum is a method of designing a course of work around basic yet fundamentally important and recurring themes (Threshold Concepts) in a discipline.

We have developed Learning Pathways for most of our Foundation Subjects to ensure that our pupils’ learning revisits Threshold Concepts repeatedly throughout their time in our school.   By doing this, pupils will be able to strengthen their schema, adding new knowledge to previously taught concepts.

Mixed Year Groups

Due to the size of our school, we have mixed year groups in Years 1 and 2, 3 and 4 and 5 and 6.  We group these as follows:

Key Stage 1 (KS1)                             Years 1 and 2

Lower Key Stage 2 (LKS2)              Years 3 and 4

Upper Key Stage 2 (UKS2)             Years 5 and 6

Designing a spiral curriculum which is sequential and builds on prior knowledge is challenging in a Mixed Year Group school.  Therefore, we have carefully designed Learning Pathways for all of our Foundation Subjects, in all year groups alternating between Year A and Year B. 

We have endeavoured to map our Curriculum so that there is a clear progression within each Key Stage, but also within and across each Teaching Year.

Learning Pathways

Our Learning Pathways show how we have mapped our Threshold Topics and/or our Key Topic Areas across the whole school for each subject area.

Timetabling

We have decided, that in order to ensure our pupils are regularly revisiting Threshold Concepts and subject specific vocabulary, that a number of subjects will be taught on a weekly basis:

History/Geography/Art/DT rotation:

Curriculum Recording

We have discussed, as a staff, how to best record evidence of learning and progression, without creating unnecessary workload.   Work is recorded as follows:

This is then followed by Spelling Shed in Year 2, which continues to look at spelling patterns and grammar.

Individual Reading

Children following the 'Phonic Shed' program, will be allocated digital reading books in line with their progress on the scheme.  They will also be given a choice of home books from our decodable reading scheme.

These books are for your child to read to you. It has been carefully chosen so that they can use the skills they have learnt in phonics to read all the words. Some books will have words for you to read with your child, these are known as ‘share with me’ books. Other books will have no words for the children to read but contain detailed pictures to discuss and create their own story. Most books will have key words to practise before and suggested questions for you to ask about the story after they have read it – you can ask other questions too as those provided are just a guide!

 In KS2 the children will continue to move through our book banded system.  

Writing

At Sytchampton Primary School, children learn how to write effectively through 'The Write Stuff' philosophy and lesson plans. From the start of a unit, children are guided through a range of writing experiences and key focuses which enables them to be exposed to a wide range of vocabulary and supported by guided writing chunks. This support provides all the support they need before independent writing.

During each lesson, children have to achieve three different outcomes (learning lenses) which have been selected from 'The Writing Rainbow'. 

 These are taught through the ‘FANTASTICs’, ‘GRAMMARISTICs’ and ‘BOOMTASTICs’.