Curriculum Overview

Eastwood Village Primary – Curriculum Overview

Rationale

The curriculum at Eastwood Village ensures we meet our vision of ‘learning at the heart of our community’.  The vast majority of pupils at the school have travelled from countries around the world, bringing with them their diverse cultures, beliefs and values from their own life experiences.  This starting point necessitates our curriculum being driven by the British values of democracy, tolerance, respect, the rule of law and liberty.  Components of British Values can be seen threading through all subjects to ensure pupils belong, prosper and contribute positively as global citizens to their local and wider community.

Design

Our curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced to ensure pupils recall and articulate knowledge confidently for their future learning and, ultimately, employment; the amount of consistent progress made by pupils across the school supports this. Teachers are consistently and effectively challenged, coached and supported by senior or more experienced teachers from within the school or wider Hub of Schools. Half termly assessments prove the majority of children are making at least expected termly progress; pupil progress meetings and moderation activities allow for detailed interventions to be put in place to support vulnerable groups of learners.

The curriculum has been designed specifically to support pupils to know and remember more and in foundation, to do, know and remember more. We have use latest educational research to promote effective working memory and retrieval of information in the way our curriculum is designed. All aspects of the curriculum have been designed with progression in mind, to ensure children build on existing skills and knowledge, which enables them to make links to new learning more easily and commit this knowledge to their long-term memories.  We ensure we have vertical links (substantive concepts) which run through a subject and support our pupils in building their schema, horizontal links (for example in Y5 pupils study Africa in Geography and Mansa Musa and the Mali Empire in History) which ensure our pupils have prior knowledge and can access a range of subjects. We see first hand the effect of these links in supporting our pupil’s knowledge retention with diagonal links (links across subjects, concepts and year groups) for example pupils learn about Muslim celebrations and Eid (FS), create patterns using prayer mats as a stimulus in art (KS1), identify and explore the five pillars of Islam in RE (LKS2), learn about Mansa Musa’s famous pilgrimage to Mecca in (UKS2) and study an ancient Islamic civilization in (UKS2). These diagonal links and pupils good understanding reflects clear substantive concepts (Religion) which runs through our history curriculum.

Subject leaders share a common and consistent approach to planning, monitoring and evaluating their subject. In doing so, they are able to confidently ensure that all staff have a firm and common understanding of the school’s curriculum intent and what this means for their own practice- see Subject Leader Governor Reports

Where appropriate, the curriculum is adapted, designed or developed in light of newly blended learning opportunities to remain ambitious and aspirational for those with EAL, SEND and other vulnerable pupils. Well-trained additional adults ensure, through small-group teaching, that all vulnerable pupils attain well, have the opportunity to catch up for lost learning as a result of the Pandemic and make good progress from their starting points.

The curriculum is studied in full and is predominantly based on the National Curriculum (NC). The school is active in meeting the Arts Mark criteria and has accessed a local community Fund to enable local artists to work with pupils across the school.  Subject leaders base their monitoring and evaluation on a highly developed progression of skills for each subject – for class teachers this ensures that progression and continuity is built into the intentions. The areas of learning from the EYFS are mapped against the NC subjects for KS1 and KS2 and subjects are identified as either ‘curriculum drivers’ or ‘discrete subjects’, with some subjects arranged to be taught in blocks of time.  A recent timetable adaption has been adopted in KS2 to enable pupils to be taught by curriculum specialists. This initiative is already proving successful to enable the range of subjects to be taught proficiently.

Please find below a summary overview of our school curriculum including topics (green=geography driver and yellow = history driver), science focus, high-quality novels and story time texts (chosen to give our pupils access to the ‘5 plagues of reading’)