Kentisbeare C of E Primary School

Intent, Implementation, and Impact

Our Curriculum is the roadmap of learning, the golden thread that runs throughout our school.  We want our curriculum to be well planned, relevant and exciting – and most of all, we want our children to love learning!

Our curriculum has a clear purpose, an intent.

Intent - What are we trying to achieve through the curriculum?  

At Kentisbeare C of E School our curriculum is designed with these key aims:

Developing Knowledge and Skills: we ensure our children are prepared for the next stage of their learning and life. To do this we focus on enabling children to know more and remember more. Our curriculum embeds key knowledge that we want our children to have as well as providing opportunities for a vast range of experiences. As pupils journey through the school, we give them opportunities to revisit key skills, practising and applying them in different contexts to gain mastery. We work with clear knowledge and skills progression documents to ensure we build on firm foundations for learning.

Developing a Sense of Place: we ensure our curriculum is relevant to the place that we live. We want our children to have a strong sense of their community and locality and the wider world around them in order that they can show compassion and care about the world and society both near and far. As a small, rural community, we want our pupils to be curious and considerate of nature and the environment.

Our curriculum is underpinned by living our Christian Values. We work and learn together to enable all to flourish and thrive while promoting our strong social, moral, spiritual and cultural ethos. We want our children to be empowered, to take calculated risks and to take responsibility for their learning, to want to fulfil their potential and to be proud of their achievements.

Implementation – so how do we deliver this?

Our curriculum is based on the National Curriculum and is organised and reviewed annually to meet the needs of the pupils at the time. We teach subjects discretely as we feel that this allows individual talent to grow and develop across the curriculum; however, we also seek to develop high quality cross-curricular links where relevant so that learning is meaningful, purposeful and connected. For example, History topics are often used as powerful starting points in English writing lessons.

To help our staff to understand what children should already know and what children should learn next, curriculum leaders have created progressive planning coverage, skills and knowledge documents as well as identifying key assessment indicators. These progression documents set out the knowledge, skills and concepts children should understand by the end of a unit of work.

Developing strong basic skills is a fundamental principle of our curriculum. High expectations for Reading, Writing, Maths, Christian Values and PSHE enable our entire curriculum offer to flourish in both core and non-core subjects. These basic skills are assessed and reviewed through robust assessment systems and regular pupil progress reviews.

We have strong sense of context and we endeavour to deliver elements of the curriculum through the extensive school grounds. We value outdoor education greatly and encourage our staff to work in creative and practical ways. Enrichment is woven into the fabric of our curriculum through themed History days and Outdoor Learning weeks. We enhance this further through inclusion of educational visits, visitors to school, links with the wider community and involvement with our church.

Impact – how will we measure our success?

School Leaders use rigorous triangulated monitoring throughout the year to gauge the impact of the curriculum design. Learning and progress is measured through data analysis and test performance as well as visits to lessons, book scrutiny and pupil voice interviews. The impact of our curriculum is seen in:

· High standards: consistently performing at above national and local averages.

· Strong progress; improving year on year.

· Quality experiences which are memorable, worthwhile and challenging.

· Teaching which is engaging, personalised and differentiated.

· Learners that are resilient, independent and confident.

· Individuals who value and respect one another and have an appreciation of the school community and the wider community.