The Greatfield Park Curriculum

Intent

At Greatfield Park Primary School, we want our pupils to develop as learners as they gain new knowledge, skills and understanding. We encourage children to have a positive attitude to their learning and to take pride in their achievements. 

Our DREAMS Values are at the heart of everything we do and our Vision of every member of our community ‘Learning and thriving, to achieve our DREAMS’ underpins our ‘Greatfield Park Primary School curriculum’.

Determined -Having the resilience to ‘stick at it’ and persevere through challenges

Respectful - Show consideration for everyone and everything, appreciating all differences.

Excellent - Being the best that we can be.

Aspirational - Setting goals to follow and aiming to achieve our ambitions.

Mindful - Being thoughtful and reflective in our choices.

Supportive - Being helpful, encouraging and giving to others. 

This is to ensure they are ready for the next stage in their education and for life in 21st Century Britain.

Throughout our Greatfield Park Primary School curriculum, we follow the National Curriculum and Early Years Framework. We ensure that learning is carefully sequenced across the whole school so that children are able to build on what they already know, understand and can do.

We are an inclusive school and provide support and challenge for all learners, including children with additional needs, children in receipt of the Pupil Premium grant, those who speak English as an Additional Language (EAL) and the more able.

We believe that the key to a good curriculum is if learning endures.  We have a concise whole school shared definition of learning: ‘Learning is a change in long-term memory.’

We aim to make a shift in children’s long-term memory by giving new learning a ‘friendly home’ in previous learning to ‘live in’.

We have created a curriculum which teaches what matters to our children-so that they know more, remember more and can apply the skills and knowledge they develop.  We view the design of our ambitious curriculum as an evolving process, which takes into consideration the needs and character of our children, their prior learning and experiences, the community in which the school exists and the statutory curriculums. Children are taught by continually developing and committed teachers.

Pupils are taught a broad curriculum. Each subject is unique and dedicated time is allocated to the teaching of national curriculum subjects discreetly. We use CUSP (Curriculum with Unity Schools Partnership) as an ‘unapologetically ambitious’ curriculum for science, history, geography and art, DT and music. CUSP is rooted in the strongest available evidence about how pupils learn and retain knowledge in the long term. There is an emphasis on oracy and vocabulary acquisition, retention and use, to break down learning barriers and to accelerate progress. A rich diet of language and vocabulary is deliberately planned for.

Units are deliberately sequenced for robust progression. Relevant subjects are positioned to support and enhance learning, so that pupils retrieve and transfer knowledge. We believe a curriculum focused on knowledge can help to close the gap between the most and least disadvantaged pupils at our school. Connections across subjects are only made where they are purposeful.

Implementation 

Children at Greatfield Park learn through receiving high-quality teaching in the classroom and a range of carefully selected experiences, including educational and residential visits as well as our extra-curricular offer. 

We recognise that each subject is unique and has its own substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge. Substantive knowledge relates to the core facts, ideas and concepts which are central to a subject. Disciplinary knowledge, on the other hand, relates to how children within each subject arrive at this knowledge. Our curriculum ensures that all pupils carefully build a comprehensive understanding of both.

We are an outward-facing school. We aim to teach our children about the world in which they live, learn from it and its issues and their place in contributing towards it, as British citizens.

Timetables are varied to ensure quality of provision. Therefore, some subjects are taught daily or weekly, others use a modular approach. Teachers focus on the key knowledge being learnt in every lesson. Our pedagogical approach takes into account some key research and evidence including:

• The ‘forgetting curve’ - We want to make sure we ease the ‘forgetting curve’ by revisiting key learning points after a shorter period of time;
• Retrieval and spaced retrieval practice – These opportunities provide teachers with powerful toolkits to strengthen their pupils’ learning and memory.

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum. We recognise that reading is vital for children to become lifelong learners. Children enjoy carefully selected high-quality texts linked to the curriculum, within a vocabulary-rich environment. Oracy is at the centre of being able to communicate successfully; we want our pupils to be able to express their learning experiences, as an inquisitive and ‘deep-thinking' learner. The value we put on spoken language is reflected in our approach to the teaching of writing. Our provision of high-quality texts supports their development as writers, enabling them to write for a range of purposes and audiences.

We want our children to have a secure knowledge and understanding of all aspects of mathematics as an essential life skill. From the early years, we place an emphasis on fluency and recall of basic number facts. Children are then taught to apply these facts in order to solve mathematical problems. Developing oracy skills supports children in expressing their mathematical thinking and reasoning. 

Lesson Structure

In CUSP subjects (art and design, design and technology, science, history, geography and music), teachers employ a clear structure to scaffold pupils towards success across the curriculum. This approach is applied within other areas of the curriculum, also.

Lessons typically are split into six phases:

• Connect

This provides an opportunity to connect the lesson to prior learning from a previous unit or lesson. Teachers return pupils’ attention to the previous lesson’s ‘knowledge note’/the ‘big idea’ for the unit, including key vocabulary. Retrieval practice allows all pupils to take time to remember things and activate their memories. Cumulative quizzing allows questions to be asked and allows pupils to carry out retrieval practice.

• Explain

This is the explicit teaching that needs to take place. Teachers ensure they are clear what they want children to know and remember. They plan for and explicitly address common misconceptions so they can address these in lessons as they arise. They are clear about the substantive knowledge and the vocabulary that they want children to understand in the session.

• Example

Providing pupils with high-quality examples is essential for learning. Pupils need to see worked examples. ‘My turn, our turn, your turn’ is a technique that is used to explicitly teach vocabulary and new concepts. Prepared examples are carefully planned and are evident in teaching.

• Attempt and Apply

Guided practice allows pupils to rehearse, rephrase and articulate their understanding. Pupils’ own attempts are what help them to secure their understanding; they need to have time to grapple and understand for themselves. This phase provides opportunities for teachers to check in with pupils to see who may need more challenge or support and if any misconceptions have arisen that need to be addressed.

• Challenge

Children probe their learning; they summarise, explain, compare and contrast. Tools are built into routines to reduce cognitive overload and allow for ‘hard thinking’.

Adaptations for Learners with SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disabilities)

We believe that good teaching for SEND children is also good teaching for all children. Our curriculum is ambitious for all pupils. Pupils with SEND are entitled to think hard.

Nevertheless, we are mindful of potential barriers to learning for children with additional needs. Therefore, we have considered ways to adapt our teaching to encourage independence and to ensure that it is accessible to all.

We adapt the curriculum, to prevent overloading the working memory by:

• Identifying the ‘critical core content’ that pupils with SEND need to know and use;
• Identifying key vocabulary and icons
• Giving clear instructions which may need repeating for specific pupils;
• Chunking knowledge/models into manageable sections;
• Using structured ‘deliberate practice’ to increase attention and retention;
• Scaffolding tasks to enable success in ‘hard thinking’, with a view to remove the scaffold;
• Opportunities to rehearse and practise key vocabulary to help consolidate knowledge;
• Giving more time during the ‘attempt’ phase to experiment or secure understanding;
• Considering using an alternative space for specific children to focus;
• Using a multi-sensory approach (visual images, hearing the words again, my turn/your turn);
• Providing adult support to discuss or collect their ideas to aid with discussion or critiquing others works.

More information on how we implement our curriculum can be found on our long term overviews for each year and on the relevant subject area documents. 

Impact 

We recognise that ‘learning and thriving’ can only be achieved when we all embody our DREAMS values.

The impact of our curriculum is for pupils’ long-term memory to have changed. We want them to know more, remember more and to be able to do more, as a result of their learning at Greatfield Park.

In order to assess the impact our curriculum is having on our pupils, we monitor the extent to which learning has become permanently embedded in children’s long-term memory. We also look for excellence in their outcomes.

We use three main tools to quality assure the implementation and impact of our curriculum:

1. Learning walks- we use these to help to evaluate subject knowledge, explanations, expectations, opportunities to learn, pupil responses, participation and relationships.
2. Assessment- we use the outcomes from tasks and tests, how well the content is understood and what the strengths and limitations are to inform us what to do next.
3. Pupil voice and book studies- we do this after content has been taught, to see the extent to which pupils are ‘knowing more, remembering more and able to do more’.

When undertaking these, we ask the following key questions:

• How well do pupils remember the content that they have been taught?

• Do books and pupil discussions radiate excellence?

• Does learning ‘travel’ with pupils and can they deliberately reuse it in more sophisticated contexts?

Teachers employ a range of strategies both at and after the point of teaching to check the impact of their teaching on the permanence of pupils’ learning. These include: retrieval practice, vocabulary use and application, deliberate practice and rephrasing of taught content, cumulative quizzing within the learning sequence, summarising and explaining the learning question from the sequence, tests and quizzes. The assessment of pupils is formative, based on pupil outcomes and questioning from each lesson. 

We use summative assessment ‘to provide an accurate shared meaning without becoming the model for every classroom activity’ (Christodolou, 2017). If our curriculum is effective, it will lead to improvements in summative assessments over time. Teacher assessment judgements are against an agreed assessment model (the curriculum). We make summative judgements annually/at the end of each unit. Teachers record summative judgements on Insight.

In preparation, we review the planned content, knowledge and vocabulary, so that conversations with pupils are meaningful and focused on what has been taught. When looking at books, we look at the content and knowledge, teaching sequence and vocabulary. We also consider pupils’ participation and consider the explanations and models used, the tasks the pupils are asked to do, the ability to answer carefully selected questions and retrieve information and the impact of written feedback. We ask careful questions that probe their knowledge, understanding and skills.

Below is a link to the class pages. Here you will find the Learning Pathways, Curriculum Letters and Knowledge Organisers for each term, where you can find more information about our curriculum.