Intent
We aim to offer a curriculum that is experiential, engaging, and highly relevant, and focuses on developing the child’s learning through enquiry. Our creative approach is designed to nurture our pupils so they are able to follow instructions better, develop a robust work ethic and become confident, well-rounded individuals.
With this in mind, we have implemented a cohesive, sequential curriculum model built around human flourishing. It encourages pupils to discuss their learning, connect and progress, year on year, ready for their transition to secondary school.
We aim to offer high quality teaching and learning for all our pupils that highlights the importance of human creativity and achievement and leads to the development of educated citizens within our own community and on a wider national and global scale. Raising aspirations and developing pupils’ interests is at the heart of this.
Rationale for Implementation
We use Dimensions ‘Learning Means the World’ Curriculum as the main vehicle for achieving our outlined intent.
This curriculum is underpinned by four highly relevant world issues, known as the four Cs:-
Culture
Communication
Conflict
Conservation
Communication
Developing language and vocabulary is a priority for us as a school, and we passionately believe that communication is key to accessing learning across the curriculum.
Our choice of words can have a profound impact on others and we are committed to the goal of every child becoming articulate. To this end, the curriculum provides many opportunities for pupils to present their learning in all different forms, moving them away from writing simple messages on iPads.
We believe it is really important to communicate well with parents, too, but we feel we have lost our ‘open door’ feel due to covid. We like our parents to be involved in celebrating learning and we want pupils to be able to talk to parents about it.
We also want our pupils to increase their understanding of language and have consistent access to high quality vocabulary. We feel the strong communication focus in this curriculum model best reflects our aspirations in this area for every pupil.
Culture
As a school that represents a mix of cultures and heritages, we want our pupils to be open and receptive to other cultures and experiences. We want to ‘give racism the red card’ by celebrating the uniqueness of different cultures, locally, nationally and internationally. By teaching pupils to be more outward-facing, it will enable them to see and celebrate who they are within a bigger cultural picture. We actively and explicitly promote cross-cultural friendship, respect, tolerance and understanding.
We want our pupils to learn about where we have come from and how history has shaped us. We also want them to look forward – we all have opportunity to be anything, and can all thrive, irrespective of background. We believe that learning about relevant people will help inspire our children and raise aspirations.
Conflict
It is vital that pupils learn to embrace their differences, appreciate others’ opinions, and develop the skills to address and resolve conflict. By looking at conflict across history and understanding its impact, we want to enable our pupils to recognise how it shapes societies and, as a result, individuals.
At a personal level, we want them to be able to recognise emotions that lead to conflict and deal with these appropriately, understanding that asking for help can be part of the conflict resolution process.
Conservation
Our pupils are passionate about eco issues. However, in a world that is very tech- based, we don’t want them to miss out on gaining an understanding of the natural world. This includes looking after animals and learning the importance of planting and growing.
We want them to become responsible custodians for the future, through problem-solving, at a local and even global level. We want them to realise that they can really make a difference.
Our curriculum narrative begins with Communication, as this underpins and links to the other three focus areas. We have followed this with Culture, because we believe that understanding identity is so important. Next, Conflict which has a focus on the past, specifically learning from mistakes, and finally Conservation which looks to the future and a better, sustainable world.
We also encourage our pupils to have high aspirations by teaching them about human creativity and achievement through additional Competency Units about famous figures that focus on Creativity, Commitment, Courage and Community.