Curriculum Intent at The Piggott School: Charvil Primary

Our curriculum offer provides a caring environment based on our Christian Vision and Values. Children are encouraged to help each other and receive help when they need it, as exemplified by our school’s Christian Vision to

‘Go and do Likewise’, Luke 10:37, The Parable of the Good Samaritan.

Our school aims are:

• To provide a caring environment based on our Christian Vision and Values
• To develop enquiring minds capable of independent thought
• To promote the value of lifelong learning
• To be open to new ideas
• To encourage respect and tolerance

 

At The Piggott School: Charvil Primary, we provide a curriculum which:

 

• has been designed by Senior Leaders, Subject leads and Teachers to provide learners with opportunities, supported by enrichment experiences, which enable pupils to be prepared educationally, morally, socially and physically both now and in the future.
• is broad and balanced, fulfilling all of the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum and school selected content.
• is ever-evolving in order to allow local, national and global contexts to provide topical learning opportunities; to keep up to date with new technologies; and to ensure that current educational research and best practice is used to provide the best teaching which will ensure that high standards are met by staff, pupils and the wider school community.
• is underpinned by our curriculum drivers of Character, Coaching, Communities, Conservation and Curiosity, which support pupils in developing the relevant skills, knowledge and information, based on the context, to achieve our aims.
• provides opportunities for content knowledge to be applied through revisiting and retrieving previously taught information. This has been achieved through the development of Threshold Concepts which have been identified in each subject and support pupils in acquiring and linking skills, knowledge and information to develop understanding and make progress.
• Is research based and planned so that units of work support children to develop a change in long-term memory by providing opportunities for children to experience and re-engage with information so that it is transferred from the working memory into the long-term memory but used frequently enough to ensure that this process occurs.
• has been planned across the school to ensure that there are opportunities for progression and review between relevant concepts and information to enable pupils to develop schema (the organisation of information and the relationships between them) over time as well as within individual programmes of study.

 

Delivery of our curriculum:

 

• is focused on the concept of ‘Quality First Teaching’, with an understanding that high quality teaching will have the greatest impact and can be supported by targeted academic support and wider strategies to promote engagement and effective learning.
• teachers are supported by Subject Leaders through monitoring of the curriculum, co-planning, co-teaching and coaching to ensure that the curriculum has the greatest positive impact on the learning of individuals and groups.
• subject leaders have responsibility for reviewing the curriculum alongside teachers, in order to ensure that the best learning opportunities are provided, based on the way that previous learners, both groups and individuals, have responded to the curriculum provided to them.
• supports pupils in adopting a growth mindset, where mistakes are opportunities for development – we all need help from others to grow.
• is focused on engagement with learning and provides sustained and substantial opportunities for pupils to spend time securing and consolidating their learning in each and every lesson.
• employs effective questioning strategies which provide opportunities for pupils to answer teachers’ questions as well as pose their own questions.
• uses assessment to inform teachers what pupils know, what they need to know and what they will need to recall and retrieve more regularly. Retrieval practice is therefore a strategy used across the curriculum to ensure that content is taught, remembered and retrieved regularly so that it can be easily brought back into the working memory, when required.

 

Curriculum Implementation

The intended curriculum is supported by the use of high-quality resources, texts, trips and visits to provide context and to support knowledge, understanding and skill acquisition. We use a variety of published schemes of work supplemented by school generated and bespoke resources.

Our curriculum is heavily focused in EYFS and Key Stage 1 on learning to read with fluency, expression and then to develop understanding. This takes place in many subjects as well as being taught discretely to ensure that pupils have the skills necessary to access the wider curriculum.

Mastery concepts are used and implemented across a wide range of subjects. These stem from our successful maths curriculum which was implemented in 2017 and follows the AET scheme of work for mathematics. Teachers are skilled at using assessment alongside the scheme of work to ensure that content is pitched accurately to provide challenge for all pupils. Our wider curriculum offer often uses the same language that pupils use in mathematics: representation, fluency, probing questions, extension and rich tasks. This enables pupils to effectively identify where they are in their learning journey and develop metacognition. We use published schemes of work in Computing (Switched on Computing), Music (Kapow), PE (PEPlanning) and PSHE (Jigsaw) as well as following the locally agreed syllabus for RE. Art and design, Design Technology, Geography, History, Science and Modern Foreign Languages (French) are bespoke schemes of work which subject leaders have put in place alongside teaching staff.

Further information can be accessed at the following link:

The Piggott School - Curriculum

The introduction of the revised Early Years Foundation Stage framework as an early adopter school is in line with our existing school priorities: to strengthen early language and vocabulary skills which is achieved through our oracy framework; to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes at the end of reception which has been achieved through strengthening our existing mastery approach as well as incorporating raised expectations in mathematical, reading and writing development.

Writing opportunities are provided across the curriculum, using high quality examples and models as well as other media, experiences and information to provide stimulus. Modelling is a key aspect of our writing teaching as this enables pupils to develop clear knowledge and understanding of how writing should be structured, allowing them to develop the skill before writing independently. Alongside this, writing lessons have a focus on vocabulary so that pupils use age appropriate and subject specific vocabulary in both spoken and written work. In every writing unit of work, there is opportunity for pupils to write at length independently to showcase their writing skills. Further to this, the skills learned in writing lessons are used in other areas of the curriculum, where opportunities to write using different genres and text types are facilitated.

Phonic knowledge and recognition of phonemes and graphemes including their correspondence is key to securing early reading skills. Our ambition to ensure that every child leaves Charvil Primary able to fluently read age appropriate texts is achieved through a focus on the acquisition of phonic knowledge at an early age. Additional staffing is deployed to support early reading with Phonics groups always taught by qualified teachers in Foundation Stage and Year 1. Further support is accessed through interventions, led by qualified teachers where possible.

From Year 2, the emphasis placed on early reading continues and equally ensures that coverage of the wider curriculum is accessed through high quality texts and high-quality teaching. This guarantees that skills learned early on are re-visited through and span each subject, ensuring that knowledge, skills and understanding are linked and that pupils make progress in each and every lesson.

In the same way that early reading skills are critical to accessing the English curriculum and wider subject matter, mathematical facts including but not limited to, number bonds and multiplication tables allow pupils to fluently access the maths curriculum as well as aspects of Science, Computing and DT. A focus on the fluent recall of these facts is well established at Charvil Primary and is supported by our access to Numbots and Times Tables Rockstars. As well as being explicitly taught in lessons, these are set as daily homework - as is reading - to support pupils to have the knowledge and skills required to access the curriculum taught in school.

Trips and visits are an essential part of our curriculum and are chosen carefully to provide experiences. These experiences which provide episodic learning are useful in supporting the acquisition of semantic memory which is when we know that a pupil is able to recall and use this knowledge and apply it to other situations or contexts. Carefully planned and selected episodes (trips, visits or experiences within the school day), such as the Foundation class visit to Rushall Farm, the Year 2 trip to Windsor Castle and the Year 4 trip to The Living Rainforest are used to support pupils to develop declarative knowledge which is more abstract and does not require the context to be able to recall it. We recognise that the experiences or episodic learning are an essential route towards pupils developing this semantic memory, thus it is used as a support system to acquiring the latter.

Curriculum Impact

Our full range of results for Key Stage 1 and Early Years Foundation Stage can be found on our website. These are consistently above national averages and our Phonics results have been in the top 10% of schools nationally in 2018 and 2019, with a letter received from the Minister of State for School Standards, following our 100% pass rate in 2019.

Our curriculum has a lasting impact on our pupils as they develop a greater understanding of what life is like for people who live in different communities, at home and in other parts of the world. They explore the views of people from religious and non-religious backgrounds and develop a strong sense of right and wrong through this and our work on behaviour leadership. The behaviour leadership programme itself develops reflective, empathetic and kind individuals who show our school values of Respect, Honesty, Equality, Dedication, Courage and Love, as well as exploring and identifying their own personal values. Character Education is taught in many ways, through assemblies, extra-curricular clubs, PE and our behaviour leadership programme. Our pupils become inspired, motivated, self-confident learners and we do this by taking account of the young age of our children when they join us and helping them to grow and develop in each task or activity they undertake. Examples of this work include:

• developing awareness, knowledge and understanding of personal actions, how they affect others, ourselves, individuals and groups and how to adapt conduct based on the context. This development takes our pupils to a stage where they can confidently lead themselves and others.
• in Year 6, pupils learn and respond to global environmental issues
• in Year 2, pupils learn about role models and being role models, culminating in them deciding upon actions they will undertake which will make a difference within the school
• the school council, who are led by our Primary School Captains, choose and promote the charities that the school supports across the year
• in Year 4, pupils learn about sustainability through their ‘from farm to fork’ unit of work, including learning about Fair Trade

Our coaching programme develops pupils’ ability to set personal goals, hold themselves and others accountable for meeting these goals as well as their actions. This is done in an age appropriate way with our youngest children and pupils develop greater knowledge of this as they progress through the primary age range.

Our pupils learn about conservation in many forms and are encouraged, through their geographical, historical and mathematical learning to understand this conceptually. This enables them to hold a practical understanding, through these subjects, Science and texts they read, such as Sky Hawk by Gill Lewis which is read in Year 5, of how they can influence change in our society to conserve the world around us, as well as the rich historical artefacts and resources the world possesses for future generations.

Throughout our curriculum, pupils develop curiosity. The implemented curriculum allows pupils to ask questions, seek answers and provide theoretical responses or conjecture which is either explore directly within lessons or is met again later in the school with possible answers.

The exceptional learning which takes place here is best seen, rather than read about. Visits to the school can be arranged by emailing charvil@piggottschool.org

You can also explore our academic results by accessing the following web page:

The Piggott School - Results

Attendance data is available on request.