Curriculum
Village Primary completed a full curriculum review to ensure that we are teaching the full requirements of the national curriculum in an engaging way which will ensure our pupils achieve their academic potential. Consideration was given to not only content choices but also to the style of delivery that would best suit our pupils given their individual starting points.
Our children join us having had a variation of experiences some of which have been disadvantaged. Some pupils are joining us from new communities and these children frequently have had challenging lives and continue to live in difficult circumstances with some families having ‘no recourse to public funds’ and limited work opportunities and little or no understanding of English within the family. Our socio-economic indicators make us aware of the limited experiences our pupils of all ages may have and our home-visits and relationships make us aware of parents’ desire to support their children and to provide every opportunity for them to achieve well and receive an excellent education.
Ensuring the children find their lessons engaging and exciting is a priority for the school and visits, visitors and real-life events are used whenever budget allows. We are aware of the need to give children the understanding of ‘the bigger picture’ in learning and to give a purpose for learning. We therefore use a topic based approach to deliver the learning intentions required in many of the national curriculum subjects with meaningful links made to some of the discrete subject-specific learning. Topics/themes are frequently introduced through a question linked to current interests – a prime learning challenge underpinned by a series of subsidiary challenges to develop in the children the ability to ask questions and be active in their learning rather than be passive learners. We want our children to raise questions and seek answers.
We are very aware of the need to improve the levels of oracy and vocabulary in our pupils and this focus impacts on both the content and style of delivery of our curriculum with enhanced funding directed to oracy in our early years and reading provision. Our use of additional staff in early years and our ‘Accelerated Reader’ scheme and approach to reading embeds our desire to increase child’s vocabularies at all levels. Our phonics scheme [The Harmony Trust Phonics Framework] is based on systematic synthetic phonics teaching and learning and is enabling increasing numbers of children to achieve the expected standard each year.
Information Technology is used as a tool to learn about and demonstrate learning of other subject areas as well as being taught as a subject in its own right.
Religious Education is taught via the Derby City programme of study, supported with a rolling programme of learning about and celebrating festivals of the local and world faiths which encourages our pupils to show mutual respect and tolerance of those with different beliefs and faiths. Social, moral, spiritual and cultural education is taught within all subject areas as well as explicitly to ensure our children develop an understanding of British values. Our children live, work and are growing up in a culturally diverse society and the school prides its self on the family of cultures and religions at Village Primary School. Our SMSC learning allows our pupils to demonstrate their thoughtful, caring and supportive natures and to understand what it means to be a citizen in Britain today. We incorporate current issues and ‘hot topics’ as well as areas of personal interest to the children. See our section on British Values to see how this is embedded into the curriculum.
We see P.E. and being physically active as a right and a desire for all our pupils and our sports funding is used to achieve the intentions of increasing fitness levels and participation in a growing range of physical activities and sports at a personal and competitive level.
English and Maths are key subject areas for the school and as such are planned for separately from other subjects as well as ensuring ample opportunities for cross-curricular learning. Wherever possible appropriate links are made to our thematic curriculum to provide an audience and purpose for our work. Our topic choices are influenced by the view of the children to enable us to use their own interests and motivations to learn. We also incorporate significant world events when appropriate.
Our prime goal as a primary school is for 100% of our pupils to leave our school at the end of year 6 being ‘secondary ready’. To achieve this we strive to ensure all learning is embedded not simply at a surface level particularly in reading, writing and maths. Revision sessions provided prior to SATS tests revisit prior teaching to achieve this goal and support our children in leaving our school achieving the expected standard.
If you would like to know more about the curriculum, please contact your child’s class teacher or the school office.