Curriculum Statement
Our Mission
To provide a rich, inspiring and engaging environment to develop lively, enquiring minds and confident communicators.
Our Vision for Learning
Our school community works together to ensure that pupils receive a rich, inspiring and engaging education. Every child is taught the knowledge and skills to become independent lifelong learners, aspiring to all standards of high achievement in all aspects of their life.
Curriculum Statement
At Perryfields Primary School, our curriculum is designed to inspire enthusiasm for learning, ensure achievement, and support pupil well-being and happiness. We provide first-hand learning experiences encouraging pupils to develop interpersonal skills and build resilience. Our cross-curricular approach enables pupils to make meaningful links with their learning.
At Perryfields Primary School our ambition for all pupils is to succeed in being ‘The Best They Can Be.’ In order to achieve this we will…
- Provide quality lifelong learning experiences across all subjects and areas of learning.
- Through inspiring themes and topics, cover a broad and balanced range of subjects, which are suitable for all pupils in a meaningful and purposeful way.
- Provide cross-curricular learning experiences centred on knowledge and skills, structured towards real purposes or outcomes that involve parents, carers and the wider school community.
- Ensure the locality of the school plays an important role and takes into full account the pupils’ backgrounds and how they can best be prepared for future life and for the next stage of their learning journey.
- Aim to provide an inclusive, challenging and engaging curriculum, as a means to address social disadvantage and SEND pupils, irrespective of starting points, where all pupils are encouraged to have a ‘Growth Mindset.’
- Plan and deliver frequent opportunities based on the application of reading, writing and maths for challenging learning, which is exciting, engaging and fun and includes visitors, visits, enrichment activities and enterprise events.
- Ensure that all of our pupils reach their potential, have respect for people of different faiths and cultures and are suitably equipped for their future lives in society.
- Celebrate our school identity through the unique experiences that our curriculum provides by developing a rich and varied menu of enhancement opportunities to engage in learning and recognise individuality.
- Provide and acknowledge success for all pupils, in all aspects of their development and recognise, encourage and celebrate all types of talent.
- Ensure that our curriculum enables us to build strong relationships, celebrate diversity, encourage respect and build a sense of community.
- Promote positive attitudes, which reflect both the school’s values and skills needed for future successful learning, through PSHE lessons, assemblies, and Building Learning Power.
- Encourage teamwork and responsibility by enabling pupils to take on key roles, becoming involved in the community, through the celebration of local traditions, learning new skills and enabling them to take an active part in events throughout the year.
Ultimately, pupils will leave Perryfields Primary School as resilient, resourceful, independent individuals, fully prepared for the next phase of their learning journey and beyond.
Knowledge Rich Curriculum
Intent Policy
Basic Principles
1. Back to Basics: due to the pandemic throughout 2020 and 2021,
2. Learning is a change to long-term memory.
3. Cognitive science tells us that working memory is limited and that cognitive load is too high if pupils are rushed through content. This limits the acquisition of long-term memory,
4. Our aims are to ensure that our pupils experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge
Curriculum Intent
Principles of Rosenshine1. Curriculum drivers shape our curriculum breadth. They are derived from ongoing research, an exploration of the backgrounds of our pupils, Our beliefs about high-quality education, school values and British Values. They are used to ensure we give our pupils an appropriate and ambitious curriculum opportunities, whilst addressing identified gaps in their knowledge and skills, namely our drivers: Oracy, Vocabulary Enrichment and Building Learning Power.
2. Cultural capital gives our pupils the essential background knowledge required to be informed and educated members of our community. Exposing them to a range of experience and raising their self awarness that opportunities extend beyond their immediate surroundings.
3. Curriculum breadth is shaped by our curriculum drivers, cultural capital, enrichment, entitlements and our ambition for pupils to be the best they can be.
4. The WALT (learning objectives) are linked though knowledge webs (schema). Knowledge webs make meaningful links to past and future learning.
5. We aim to ensure that our curriculum is planned, sequenced so that knowledge and skills build on prior learning as progression through each year group is key to retaining prior learning.
6. Cognitive science tells us that working memory is limited and that cognitive load is too high if pupils are rushed through content. This limits the acquisition of long-term memory. Objectives are prioritised based upon the learning needs of our pupils.
7. The Progession Model outlines the knowledge and skills pupils need to acquire by the end of each phase with links made to previous and future learning.
8. As part of our Progression Model we use Retrieval Practice tasks to embed pupil’s learning and implement the key Principles of Rosenshine.
Implementation
1. Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it:
– Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
– Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
– Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
The Rosenshine Principles support the implementation of the curriculum by ensuring that pupils regularly recall prior learning. You will often see this at the start of our lessons in the form of a mini quiz or questioning. When prior learning is committed to their long-term memory it becomes fluent or ‘automatic’, freeing space in our working memory which can then be used for comprehension, application, and problem-solving.
2. In addition to the three principles, we also understand that learning is invisible in the short term and that sustained mastery takes time.
3. Embed key concepts in pupils’ long-term memory so they can apply them fluently.
4. Sequencing and progression are planned across all subjects.
5. Phonics and reading are prioritised to enable pupils to access all curriculum areas. When learning to read, reading books matches pupils’ phonic knowledge.
6. Although our content is subject-specific (oracy, vocabulary enrichment and BLP interweaves throughout), we make intra-curricular links to strengthen schema
wherever possible and references made to national and international events.
7. Continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, replaces the teaching of some aspects of the curriculum and, in other cases, provides retrieval practice for
previously learned content. For example, teaching time with real-time opportunities, using Roman numerals daily in maths lessons (Y4 onwards).
8. Teachers use a range of strategies e.g. modelling, scaffolding questioning to enable pupils to understand key concepts across a range of subjects.
9. Continuous Professional Development (CPD) is designed to ensure teachers’ subject knowledge is continuously strengthened.
10. Oracy teaching and learning, enables all pupils to communicate effectively, develop a higher order thinking and deepen their understanding. A classroom rich in talk, in which questions are planned, peer conversations are modelled and scaffolded and the teacher uses talk skilfully to develop thinking, being the intended outcome.
11. Effective use of assessment enables teachers to check pupil’s understanding which helps to plan and further shape the curriculum.
Impact
1. We recognise that children learn at different rates through different learning styles. Secure learning is a change to long-term memory and progress is measured by
pupils’ application of retained knowledge, facts and skills. All pupils including, socially disadvantaged and SEND are prepared for the next stage of their learning.
2. Attainment in phonics and reading is assessed and gaps effectively closed through interventions so that pupils are able to read widely and often with fluency and comprehension, appropriate to their age.
3. At key points in the year, formative and summative assessments are undertaken, which allow pupils to demonstrate their growing understanding of their subject and enable teachers to assess the impact of their teaching. These summative assessments are typically taken three times a year, allowing teachers to focus on formative assessment from lesson to lesson.
4. We use lesson observations and learning walks to monitor if the pedagogical style matches our non-negotiables and expectations.
5. Pupils’ confidence, articulacy and capacity to learn are developed and improved through explicit teaching of oracy skills