Curriculum Overview
Our Curriculum
At West Horndon Primary School, we are passionate about providing a curriculum for our learners which meets their needs in the 21st Century. Our approach to curriculum planning is bespoke and flexible so that it can be adapted to meet the needs of learners over time. If you would like to find out more, please scroll to the bottom of this page where you can view our bespoke curriculum offer.
As a maintained primary school we start by ensuring that we meet the requirements of the National Curriculum.
Basic principles
- Learning is a change to long-term memory.
- Our aims are to ensure that our students experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge.
Strong Foundations
Strong foundations underpin our curriculum. We prioritise the secure development of essential skills in reading (including phonics and fluency), writing, spelling, handwriting, number sense, and oracy, recognising that these are fundamental to pupils’ success across the wider curriculum. These skills are taught explicitly and systematically so that pupils can access increasingly ambitious learning as they progress through each key stage.
Alongside this, we explicitly teach and reinforce behaviours for learning through our school rules of being Ready, Respectful, and Safe, ensuring pupils are prepared to learn, engage positively with others, and sustain focus as learning becomes more complex.
Appropriate experiences and Cultural Capital
We have developed four curriculum drivers that shape our curriculum, bring about the aims and values of our school, and to respond to the particular needs of our community:
- Mental Wellbeing
- Problem Solving
- Possibilities
- Global Identity
- Social Skills
In designing our curriculum we start by identifying our Curriculum Drivers. The opportunities and challenges that the context of our learners setting and lives present focus the development of our bespoke, ever evolving, curriculum.
We have developed a list of '50 Things' which capture the essence of the breadth of experiences we want pupils to have during their journey with us. These form part of the Curriculum Entitlement for every learner.
Cultural capital is the background knowledge of the world pupils need to infer meaning from what they read. It includes vocabulary which, in turn, helps pupils to express themselves in a sophisticated, mature way.
At the heart of our curriculum is our core belief that happy, secure and well children learn best!
Sustained mastery
Nothing is learned unless it rests in pupils’ long-term memories. This does not happen, and cannot be assessed, in the short term. Assessment, therefore answers two main questions: ‘How well are pupils coping with curriculum content?’ and ‘How well are they retaining previously taught content?’
Implementation
Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles
underpin it:
- Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
- Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
- Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
In addition to the three principles we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term and that sustained mastery takes time.
Some of our content is subject specific, whilst other content is combined in a cross-curricular approach.
Continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, replaces the teaching of some aspects of the curriculum and, in other cases, provides retrieval practise for previously learned content.
