Curriculum

Statement of Intent

At Engayne, we aspire to give every pupil the opportunity to reach their full potential in a safe, enjoyable and stimulating environment which prepares them for the ever-changing world. As a result, it is our clear intent that our school curriculum promotes both learning and personal growth and development – our curriculum is designed to develop children’s love of learning and their willingness to explore through a combination of learning techniques. We aim to ensure pupils enjoy learning and feel prepared for life after school. We also intend to offer our pupils new and exciting experiences through extra-curricular activities that are designed to build resilience, confidence and self-esteem.

Implementation

At Engayne, we understand the importance of promoting diversity at school. As a result of this, we ensure all negative attitudes are challenged, avoid stereotypes in curricular resources, have clear rules regarding how people treat others and have created an inclusive environment for students and staff.

Our primary tool in delivering the curriculum is quality-first teaching. The teacher knows their pupils best and understands what they know and can do, and what they need to be able to do next.

We recognise that pupils should be challenged in their schooling, learning from failures and celebrating successes. We intend for our curriculum to be empowering, enabling pupils to develop their interpersonal skills, creativity and independence.

Pupils’ personal development is a priority for us. Specifically, we believe that learning to be polite and sociable is as important as any other aspect of school life. We model positive relationships between pupils and adults at all times.

While there is a focus on literacy, mathematics and science, we ensure that we provide a broad and balanced curriculum for all our pupils. Developing children’s independence and motivation as learners and their potential to become well-rounded, well-informed citizens of the future is at the heart of all our teaching and learning. Therefore, we aim to deliver a substantive school curriculum, incorporating a diverse range of activities and opportunities to enrich and deepen children’s cultural capital. These activities and opportunities include, but are not limited to:

  • theme weeks and theme days
  • outdoor play and learning (OPAL) – at Engayne, play is part of the curriculum
  • a wide variety of extra-curricular activities, including sporting, drama and other clubs
  • educational visits, including visits to art galleries, museums and places of worship.
  • in-school workshops delivered by outside agencies
  • visitors from the local community, e.g. the police, borough library service and faith groups
  • school shows, drama, dance and music performances and special assemblies
  • Forest School and other outdoor learning activities
  • residential visits
  • enterprise projects in which pupils are encouraged to use their energy and labour to raise money

All activities carried out by the school are designed to enhance pupils’ learning experience, from personal connections between pupils and teaching skills that are essential for life after school.

We engage with the wider community by ensuring there are opportunities for pupils to participate in community projects, for example engaging with care homes and litter picking. Each of these projects is embedded in the curriculum and shows pupils the value of protecting and being involved in their community.

Our staff value the different ways in which pupils learn, and we plan lessons to account for these differences. Teachers are encouraged to make cross-curricular links wherever possible in their lessons so that pupils can draw upon knowledge from different subjects and understand how each topic plays a part in everyday life. Teachers also have the option to block units of work in the foundation subjects to encourage a fuller understanding of the topic the children are learning about. This allows for the children to learn about that topic in depth for a set period of time without having to jump about to different topics. The structure of the curriculum is set to continue from prior learning to encourage children to make links back to what they have learnt previously.

Teachers use different learning resources and methods to teach core content, for example educational videos, lessons involving ICT equipment and group work. By using different techniques, we aim to ensure pupils are engaged with learning and accommodate pupils who learn in a different way to their peers.

Our curriculum also includes the ‘hidden curriculum’ – what the children learn from the school environment, the values we promote and how they are treated and expected to behave. We aim to teach children how to grow into positive, responsible people who can work and co-operate with others while developing knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes so that they achieve their true potential. An example would be the OPAL project which takes place every day at lunch time, encouraging the children to explore a range of activities with others that they may not normally spend time with, on activities that they may not usually choose to complete.

We are continually reviewing and improving the curriculum we offer to our children. The Engayne school curriculum is always evolving, according to the needs of our children and to the aspirations of the staff and community. As evidence of this, we now explicitly teach metacognitive learning strategies to children to help them organise and effectively manage their learning independently.

Above all, we believe that children are entitled to receive a high-quality curriculum that leads to the highest possible standards and to an enjoyment of learning.

IMPACT

Our curriculum is designed with the aim that pupils will remember what they have learned and can build on skills and knowledge over time. We use assessment to improve our curriculum design in two ways. We assess individual pupils in order to determine what they know, remember and can do so that we can adapt our teaching and revisit topics when necessary. We also assess the attainment of classes and cohorts so that we can adapt the future curriculum to improve the pupils’  learning experience, particularly to adapt our curriculum in the longer term to improve the pupils’ retention of knowledge and skills.

National Curriculum overviews for every year group can be found in the long-term plans section of the curriculum page on our school website.

John Manifold

November 2023

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