Welcome from our headteacher
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Curriculum overview
Our curriculum aims are closely linked to our school vision, that children will leave us as ‘Happy Learners, High Achievers’. For us, this means that we want our children to be prepared for their future in a happy, safe and supportive environment.
We believe children are entitled to a broad curriculum which gives them the space and tools to develop as people who are ready to become citizens of Bradford and the wider world. We aim to provide a curriculum that encourages children to see the opportunities available to them and make the most of their opportunities, by achieving their academic potential. This is all supported by our work to develop the qualities of respect, resilience, readiness and reflection within our children.
We endeavour to work in partnership with parents and the wider community to support our children’s personal and academic development.
Our curriculum takes account of our pupil’s context as they enter and move through our school, for example by underpinning our children’s learning with a communication friendly environment, and preparing them for life in our diverse city by using links with other schools in the Northern Star Academies Trust family.
We value our school’s location and our curriculum aims to ground the children in their local community. This will allow children to understand their place in the world and use this as a springboard to further their ambitions and hopes.
When designing our curriculum, we consider our aims alongside the aims of the National Curriculum that we “provide pupils with the essential knowledge that they need to be educated citizens.” And “Introduce pupils to the best that has been thought and said; and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.”
We also know that the National Curriculum is just one element in the education of every child and have designed our curriculum to go beyond this. We have planned our curriculum to be broad and expose children to a wide variety of subjects, arts and cultures. We have designed opportunities for children to develop as well-rounded people who can support their own well-being.
We understand that children need coherence in their learning journey through school and learning units are sequenced so that concepts and knowledge are introduced at the right time and are built on prior experiences.
Our curriculum supports our children to achieve highly by designing well planned, ambitious sequences of learning that are knowledge rich and allow children to learn in context. These sequences are designed around a ‘Big Question’ that we would like the children to be able to answer by the end of those set of lessons. End points are identified for each year group for each subject. We recognise that children need activities that are challenging and provoke curiosity, yet pose low threat to children. Therefore, when designing our curriculum, we have considered how to structure learning activities that have high expectations of children, but also scaffolds which support children to achieve, whatever their starting point.
We believe that children need to be exposed to a rich knowledge base, and, that for learning to take place, there needs to be a change to long term memory. Therefore, when we plan our curriculum, we have given children time to return to key knowledge and designed activities to build over a series of sessions. As children are asked to apply their knowledge over this series of lessons; do things with it, and be creative, then skills will be introduced and developed. We recognise the importance of children’s vocabulary understanding and, in our curriculum design, we have identified key vocabulary for each learning sequence and activities to support children’s vocabulary learning.
If you would like any more information about the curriculum the school is following, please contact your child's class teacher.
You can view the long term plan which sets of the learning for each year group by subject below. Please also see each subject page for more information.
