The Curriculum at Forest View Primary School

Intent

The curriculum at Forest View is designed to provide a broad and balanced education that meets the needs of all children. It provides opportunities for children to develop as independent, confident and successful learners, with high aspirations, who know how to make a positive contribution to their community and the wider society. We promote academic success, creativity and a positive attitude to learning. Our curriculum ensures learning is effective, exciting and above all, allows the children  to explore the world they live in and prepare for the opportunities and challenges of life in the 21st century. Character development is prioritised and explicitly taught. All year groups from Nursery to Year 6 follow the Commando Joe’s programme, which aims to develop characteristics we believe to be essential to a child’s future success; these include: resilience, empathy, self-awareness and leadership skills.

We plan our curriculum to ensure it has progression, sufficient breadth, balance and relevance for each child. We have personalised the Learning Challenge Curriculum to ensure it is relevant for our learners. This approach secures greater learning involvement, builds on children’s prior knowledge and helps them to develop into creative, confident learners, who are keen to take risks, collaborate and persevere. These qualities are those that we feel are vital for success in life as well as learning.

Our curriculum, whilst paying due regard to achieving high standards in Maths and English, is also carefully designed to ensure children develop skills for life. We place great value on developing the ‘whole child’,supporting pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development and providing an engaging programme of study in all curriculum areas. The whole school team aspires to impart children with memorable experiences and many diverse opportunities from which the children can learn and develop a range of transferable skills. Our school is lucky enough to be situated in an excellent location, close to the sea, the cities of Newcastle, Sunderland, Durham and Gateshead and the countryside of Northumberland, and acknowledges its location in many ways. Our curriculum is enriched by using this as a starting point for engaging interest and accessing the rich cultural resources that the North East has to offer.

A primary focus of our curriculum is to raise aspirations, develop a sense of personal pride in achievement, and provide a purpose and relevance for learning.

Implementation

We are required to base our teaching on the National Curriculum for England, which sets out clear, full and statutory entitlement to learning for all pupils. It determines the content of what will be taught, and sets attainment targets for learning. It also determines how progress will be assessed and reported.

Our curriculum incorporates the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum 2014 and other experiences and opportunities, which best meet the learning and developmental needs of the children in our school.  Our drive is to have a curriculum that meets all statutory requirements of the National Curriculum and allows children to explore the world they live in and prepare for the opportunities and challenges of life in the 21st century.

Each topic starts with a Prime Learning Challenge, which is expressed as a question. We teach our curriculum through the driver subjects of Science, History and Geography. Each year group has a breakdown of knowledge, skills and understanding to be taught for each subject and this ensures that progression is built upon from the previous year’s learning. We start all new learning challenges with a pre-learning task to assess children’s prior knowledge before planning any subsidiary learning tasks. This also ensures that any gaps in learning can be addressed. All of the subsidiary learning tasks are also expressed as questions. We then build and extend learning making explicit links between different subject areas. The teaching of new vocabulary and oracy skills are at the heart of our curriculum and we deliberately build in opportunities for talk repetition and practice to ensure that depth of knowledge is secure. We aim to create deep learning opportunities through our curriculum and the use of questioning so that every child is curious and challenged.

Our high expectation of children begins in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). Children begin Forest View Primary in our Nursery when they are three years old. Nursery and Reception children are regularly assessed throughout the year using both birth to 5 and development matters guidance. EYFS leaders have created a bespoke assessment programme made up of statements for each area of learning that we want our children to achieve at baseline, aut 2, spring 2, then ELGs for Reception and baseline, aut 2, spring 2 and Summer 2 for Nursery. 

Our children do well in meeting their Early Learning Goals by the end of their Reception year. 

Pupils begin early phonics lessons in Nursery becoming more formalised in Reception, and these continue through into Key Stage 1 (KS1) and sometimes into KS2. There is a focus on exploratory play in the Early Years based around the children’s interests, core texts and key skills. In Reception, all pupils take part in a daily Literacy, Maths and a Phonics lesson as well as individual reading sessions.

In KS1 and KS2, children continue their learning journey, taking part in Maths and English lessons every day. In Year 1 (Yr1), children continue to have daily phonics lessons whilst in Yr2, children access daily Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar (ESPG) lessons, which are linked to their learning in writing, to allow them to apply and deepen their basic skills. The phonics scheme we follow is Sounds Write Inc. and our book scheme is Dandelion decodable readers in Rec/KS1 and Book Banding towards the end of Year 2 and in KS2. We use Accelerated Reader to facilitate learning to read in Book Banding areas. Reading plus is used in UKS2 to further develop reading fluency, comprehension and vocabulary development. 

In Yr6, focus gradually shifts to the end of Key Stage assessments as children are prepared for these tests and the transition into Yr7. There is no narrowing of our broad and balanced curriculum in Year 6. 

All children in KS1 and 2 access the wider curriculum through discrete lessons, although links are made between curriculum areas when appropriate. We follow the South Tyneside Agreed Syllabus for R.E.

Due to our local demographic, we offer a wide range of enrichment activities within the classroom but also with the use of visitors and educational visits outside of the classroom/school – the aim is to extend our children’s cultural capital and give them the best preparation for life after school. We further enrich our pupils with a wide range of before school, lunchtime and after school clubs. Opportunities for all children to attend are provided.

Impact

The outcomes of the curriculum are measured by the attainment and progress made by the children. Put simply, how much the children know and remember including whether or not the children have mastered a particular skill. Teachers continually use assessment of the children’s responses and the work they produce to measure impact. Subject leaders play an important part in the success of the curriculum by leading a regular programme of monitoring, evaluation and review. This includes book scrutinies, learning walks and lesson observations to measure the impact of teaching and learning. As well as pupil interviews to gauge children’s engagement and enjoyment of the curriculum.

Assessment is used to identify children’s progress and find out areas where they are less confident. These assessments inform the teacher’s lesson planning. Assessment is carried out across the curriculum through questioning and low risk quizzes. Children complete summative assessments termly to show progress in reading, writing and maths. These assessments are used to identify key subject areas to inform planning, and to create a bespoke intervention programme for focus children, who need to be targeted for specific learning.

For a full analysis of our curriculum and a breakdown of each year group’s curriculum, please see the relevant Curriculum Overviews.

For further details about the implementation of the curriculum, please contact the school for the relevant subject policy documents or contact Mrs Marshall (curriculum lead).