Broad Curriculum, brought alive!

At Whitchurch Primary School we believe in a 

Broad Curriculum, brought alive!

 It is our intent to provide children with a curriculum that is relevant to their lives; linking with what they already know and can learn from, taking into account the rich heritage and advantages offered by our immediate, local and national surroundings, both physical and in terms of time.

 It is our intent to provide the children with a curriculum that is ambitious and exciting! We want our children to learn from experiences, WOWs and through actively interacting. We have introduced our ‘one thing a week’ initiative, which over time has evolved into our ‘broad curriculum, brought alive’ aim, where each topic is introduced by an event, visit or happening!

 It is our intent to provide the children with a curriculum that follows a firm concept. Our curriculum builds on skills that are learnt on a year by year basis. What is learnt in Year 1 will be built on in Year 2. What is covered in Year 4 will require knowledge from Year 3. By ensuring this across and within year groups, we intend to ensure every child makes progress every year.

 We begun our journey on developing this curriculum intent in early 2018, and as a result have developed a series of statements, displayed to the children on banners within our school:

Our Implementation Story….

In order to implement our relevant, ambitious and exciting curriculum we began where our intent began: Looking at relevant and exciting opportunities in out local and national area.

Through visits to tourist information offices, asking teachers for ‘what already worked’, and surveying parents and children we discovered what was fun and important to learn about.

Next we breathed new life into our curriculum. Through redesigning the structure around our WOWs and ensuring progression both educationally and chronologically, we were able to design a continuity of lessons for each and every subject over each child’s time at our school, whilst still meeting our intent of a ‘Broad curriculum, brought alive!’

However, we also needed to ensure our curriculum allowed children to make progress both in year and across years, and that each and every National Curriculum objective (or skill) would be covered thoroughly through each child’s time at the school. This was achieved through combining our WOWs with the LSP curriculum, our academy trust.

Our 2021-2022 onwards curriculum can be viewed by clicking the link on the right of this page.

 

Measuring Impact.

This year we have continued measuring the impact of our implementation, to see how well the curriculum meets our intent.

This has always been the case at Whitchurch Primary School, as our subject leaders are trained in leadership skills allowing them to assess the effectiveness of everything that we do.

Concerning our curriculum implementation and how it meets our intent, subject leaders follow a cycle of scrutiny and quality assurance, where among many activities, they ask pupils of all backgrounds and groups their opinions on the curriculum (pupil voice), regularly carry out ‘book looks’ where the quality of provision is assured, and oversee planning, ensuring it meets our strict guidelines.

Once the effectiveness of our curriculum has been ascertained, this is presented to all staff in staff meetings, and a condensed report discussed in monthly governor meetings. This information and decisions made are then fed into our future staff meeting agendas, ensuring a cycle of constant curriculum improvement at Whitchurch Primary School, and ensuring that all our ‘Achieving Our Best Together!’

How can I find out more about the curriculum?

Each term class teachers send out their 'boxes' sheet, a summary of what is being taught each term. Class teachers also send out a weekly newsletter in school book bags that detail this week's and next week's teaching.

There is also a link on our Parents> Covid help and homelearning page.

Finally, feel free to speak to any of our teachers about the curriculum, or make an appointment for a more in depth discussion!