Stonesfield Primary School – Curriculum statement
Intent
Stonesfield Primary School sets high academic standards for all our pupils: supporting and challenging everyone to achieve their best. Our ambitious curriculum is designed to teach our pupils to succeed on life’s journey by developing confident and resilient children who become knowledgeable, active citizens caring for our planet. We teach kindness and inclusivity, we celebrate individuals and we promote respect of ourselves, others and our locality. We value the wellbeing of our staff and pupils by promoting good physical and mental health and fostering a warm, nurturing, safe environment.
Our curriculum is coherently planned to provide strong foundations in English through a focus on oracy as we explicitly teach vocabulary and focus on speaking and listening across the curriculum. This is further supported by precise teaching of reading through phonics. In Maths, a mastery approach is used to deepen understanding and support application of knowledge to different problems and situations.
Learning together to achieve our best.
Our curriculum aims to give children the opportunity to:
- Understand the purpose and value of their learning and see its relevance to their past, present and future
- See clear links between different aspects of their learning
- Experience the challenge and enjoyment of learning
- Learn within a coherent and progressive framework
- Develop new skills through a variety of interesting contexts
Our approach
We deliver high standards in teaching and learning through:
- Reflective staff with excellent subject knowledge who evaluate their teaching and the curriculum regularly against evidence-informed practices and are open to feedback and change
- Applying The Science of Learning (cognitive science): cognitive load, retrieval, interleaving, instruction, deliberate
practice - High levels of challenge for all pupils
- Strong focus on vocabulary and high standards of oracy
- Stimulating classroom environments which provide support and encourage independence
We deliver high standards in English by:
- Access to and discussion of vocabulary rich, high quality texts for all pupils
- Daily Phonics lessons in Early Years and KS1 ensure there is a strong emphasis on decoding and skills of early reading
- Explicit teaching of reading skills (VIPERS) through whole class reading in KS1 and KS2
- Well planned extended units of English with a clear purpose and audience for writing
We deliver high standards in Maths by:
- Following a Mastery approach with high expectation for all pupils (keep up not catch up)
- High quality daily Maths lessons which ensure pupils are competent in fluency, problem solving and reasoning
- Daily retrieval practice, regular Fast Facts sessions and dynamic teacher interventions informed by feedback
We deliver high standards in the wider curriculum by:
- A well planned, progressive, curriculum with an eye to global issues while keeping local issues at it’s heart
- A strong focus on vocabulary and retention of learning through strategies that promote retrieval
- A strong focus on physical and mental health which creates healthy, resilient, positive pupils
- A warm nurturing atmosphere with a strong focus on relationships, trust and communication which creates kind, respectful pupils
The Cornerstones Curriculum
We believe that children deserve a balanced curriculum that enables them to develop a deep understanding of all subjects and the interconnections between them.
The rationale for the Cornerstones Curriculum takes the form of 10 Big Ideas that provide a purpose for the aspects, skills, knowledge and contexts chosen to form the substance of the curriculum.
These Big Ideas form a series of multi-dimensional interconnected threads across the curriculum, allowing children to encounter and revisit their learning through a variety of subject lenses. Over time, these encounters help children to build conceptual frameworks that will enable a better understanding of increasingly sophisticated information and ideas.
Understanding the structure
The Cornerstones Curriculum has three structural tiers. Each tier builds on the previous to create interconnected layers. These interconnected layers provide a robust framework that ensures connectivity across the curriculum with direct links back to the national curriculum programmes of study. The tiers of the curriculum structure are set out in the diagram below
Tier 1: Big Ideas
The curriculum is led by 10 central Big Ideas. These Big Ideas are the overarching aims of the curriculum. They were conceived by careful analysis of the national curriculum subjects, drawing out common themes, which then, through a period of refinement, became the Big Ideas.
Tier 2: Subjects
In the Cornerstones Curriculum, we use the terms ‘concepts’ and aspects. A concept is an abstract idea within a subject and an ‘aspect’ is a particular part or feature of a subject. In the curriculum structure, each Big Idea is directly connected to the curriculum subjects, which have the relevant concepts or aspects through which the Big Idea can be delivered. For example, in geography, the Big Idea of Humankind is connected to and delivered through the geographical aspects of Settlements and land use and Human features and landmarks. In history, the Big Idea of Humankind is connected to and delivered through the historical concepts or aspects of Everyday life, Hierarchy and power, and Civilisations.
To ensure coverage of the national curriculum, each subject concept or aspect is then matched to the relevant programmes of study. Across the Cornerstones Curriculum, there is full coverage of the programmes of study for art and design, design and technology, geography, history, computing, science and, maths is covered by integrated White Rose Maths projects. The diagram below shows an example of how Tier 1 and 2 are linked back to the national curriculum programmes of study.
Tier 3: Progression framework
In Tier 3, programmes of study, concepts and aspects are broken down into smaller component parts or ‘chunks’ to form a cohesive progression framework. The progression framework runs from Reception to Year 6 and includes knowledge and skills that children need to know and be able to do in order to make progress through the curriculum.
