Curriculum Statement

Curriculum Statement

Our Intent:

Our motto ‘Together Everyone Achieves More’ demonstrates our community ethos and approach for success. We fully embrace the strengths that are reflected in our school community and work in very close partnership with parents/carers, governors and the local community to build on these.

We are committed to making the curriculum accessible for those with disabilities or special educational needs by complying with our duties in the Equality Act 2010 and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014.

Our Curricular goals:

Growth Mindset/ Love of Learning/ Skills for Life

At the heart of our curriculum is the promotion of independent learning skills, which we believe is an essential element for life-long learning and character building. We seek to instill in our children, not just a set of facts or a series of skills, but how to succeed as citizens.

Our learning behaviours, ‘7Rs of Learning’ develop our children as current and future, independent learners. They are a fundamental tool for the delivery of the curriculum and they are woven into all aspects of school life. Our 7Rs are pillars central to this ethos: Our children describe these as:

  • Relationships: trust, how good you are with friends, kind, respectful, listening, same to everyone.

  • Resilience: Learning from our mistakes, Growth Mindset, Keep trying, don’t give up, perseverance, confidence, effort.

  • Risk Taking: Taking on new challenges, not going for the easy option, go for the challenge, being brave, be proud of achievements, out of comfort zone.

  • Reflective: Look back on work, reflect and make it better, consider how you can challenge yourself, fix or uplevel work, going back to things to improve them, learn from mistakes.

  • Resourcefulness: Using resources around you sensibly. Taking care of them. Tidying. Finding different ways to find something.

  • Respect: being kind to resources, grateful for what we have, thoughtful, treating everyone and everything with care. Listening.

  • Responsibility: making choices which are best for ourselves and best for others.

We believe that children should, through our Learning Zone, become:

  • Independent critical thinkers- be confident enough to form and defend their own opinions as active citizens.

  • Problem solvers- have a creative approach to issues, always looking towards the solution rather than the difficulty.

  • Lovers of learning- we want our children to be active participants in their learning who independently seek out learning and knowledge for its own sake.

  • Independent researchers and to be digitally literate - we encourage independent research and opportunities to develop independence in all areas of the curriculum.

  • Citizens of the world - individuals who see themselves as agents of change and take responsibility for themselves, each other and the world around them.

Our Implementation:

Learning Zone

  • Our school operates with 4 phases – Foundation Stage, Key Stage One, Lower Key Stage Two and Upper Key Stage Two. Each phase works within a Learning Zone, providing additional space and resource for learning. Group size varies to offer smaller teaching groups for core subjects whilst pupils work in supported smaller groups and independently on their theme work.

  • We have adopted a theme specific approach in the foundation subjects, so that children can be taught the knowledge and thinking skills required for each subject. Theme based Big Questions support deeper level thinking through following lines of enquiry in Geography and History. However, we have made careful cross-curricular links to optimise opportunities to bring art, science, RE and the core subjects into the Big Question where relevant.

Cultural capital and diversity/inclusivity 
  • All curriculum areas are planned around Key Influencers, individuals from diverse backgrounds, who have been a great influence on societies and cultures around the world, today and in the past and/or individuals who have excelled at our 7Rs.

  • We equip our pupils with secure knowledge of the world and the ‘cultural capital’ needed to boost their confidence and aspirations in an increasingly competitive world. This comes from rich and carefully thought out experiences.
  • Varied visits and educational experiences are designed to support the curriculum and broaden experiences from EYFS to year 6 both around the local area, into Cambridgeshire and further afield on residential visits.

  • We think carefully about guest visitors and special collapsed curriculum days that build real experiences into the curriculum to enrich learning.

  • Ambitious lesson content, democratic structures such as Champions of Change, our House system and planned activities such as debating are interwoven into our curriculum so that pupils build knowledge and understanding of important places, people, events and ideas such as democracy.

  • We celebrate all of the major faiths through the taught RE curriculum and the year group assemblies so our pupils not only have significant knowledge of but also learn from other cultures/faiths to develop British values such as tolerance. We discuss British Values weekly in our Assemblies and in our ‘Pause for Thoughts’ where the children engage in discussing a key question linked to what is currently happening in the world.

  • Our pupils with SEND and disadvantaged pupils fully access the curriculum, supported inclusively within the Learning Zones.

Reading/Language/Communication/Confidence

  • All of our curricular goals rest on an ability to understand, master and deploy language, which is why we have both reading and ‘oracy’ at the heart of all subjects. There is a strong focus on language acquisition and oral confidence, particularly in the Early Years but maintained across the school.

  • Reading is the bedrock of our curricular offer and all of our pupils who can access the curriculum are taught to read using the 'FFT Success for All' phonics programme which has been accredited and validated by the Department for Education.  Phonics is taught with passion and purpose from reception to year 3. We consciously support our pupils to be lifelong readers through developing a deep reading for pleasure culture. Every class has a rich daily story time and extended reading sessions during the week.

How do we ensure that there is curricular progression?

  • In order to achieve our goals, we have carefully planned our curriculum so that it has breadth as well as ambition. We follow the National Curriculum and have developed age-related curricular end points through progression documents in the core subjects and in the foundation subjects in our medium term planning.
  • English is taught using a progression developed through long term plans of teaching units that are designed to ensure whole school coverage of non-fiction genres/text types, fiction and poetry. Each unit follows the three phases of the teaching sequence, engaging in quality texts, understanding the features of language and finally leading to a quality written outcome. Maths is taught using the ‘Herts’ scheme to provide a strong foundation and consistency for all our staff. They are carefully sequenced to ensure careful progression and clear end points.

  • We have chosen our content carefully and sequenced it through and across years to form a coherent journey starting in EYFS. Currently we are tweaking to ensure progression is clear, that there is curricular depth and more able pupils are consistently challenged. Our teachers work in subject teams across each phase of learning to ensure progression and have mapped concepts and skills in subject progression documents.

  • We build up learning in small steps and ensure children progress, using active metacognition to help our pupils to make further learning gains. Our approach to planning across the curriculum ensures that children revisit concepts to ensure knowledge, vocabulary and skills shift from working to long-term memory.

  • Our Feedback approach has been reviewed to ensure children ‘own’ the feedback about their learning and can engage in active dialogue to action next steps.

  • Our assessment and intervention programmes are carefully targeted and rigorous, ensuring that pupils who begin to fall behind are targeted for further support through:

    • Daily 1:1 intervention in Reading and Mathematics from Reception to Year 6

    • Groups to support wellbeing and learning behaviours, such as social skills, self-belief and resilience.

    • Year 6 booster programmes in Literacy & Mathematics.

We use the following strategies to challenge all children:

  • High order questioning to challenge and encourage children to explain their thinking with questions such as: 'What makes you think that? ', 'What evidence do you have for this? '

  • A focus on the use of high level language in the classroom.

  • Exploration of vocabulary through reading high level materials and encourage challenging vocabulary in the work children complete.

  • Teacher modelling to exemplify excellence.

  • Feedback: both written and verbal challenges and promotes higher level thinking.

  • Allowing freedom to lead and guide tasks.

  • Our Big Questions take children out of their comfort zones and make them think really hard about their work. Some examples are:

    • How has space travel evolved over time? (KS1)

    • How did the railway revolution change Britain? (LKS2)

    • How did Hitler rise to Power? (UKS2)

    • What are the geographical similarities and differences within the Amazon Basin? (UKS2)

Pupil Voice forms a regular mechanism of feedback to both their peers and staff about how they learn best and how the environment and approach promote a positive atmosphere for learning.

Staff at Hemingford Grey Primary School review and apply current research to their teaching methods and work effectively in phase and subject teams to share knowledge, challenge conventional teaching approaches and provide the best education to support the future outcomes of all pupils.