Curriculum
At Gisburn Road our curriculum is all the planned activities that we organise in order to promote learning, personal growth and development.
Our curriculum intent
At Gisburn Road Community Primary School our curriculum is designed to:
- recognise children’s prior learning
- provide first hand learning experiences
- allow the children to develop interpersonal skills
- build resilience and become creative, critical thinkers
Every child is recognised as a unique individual. We celebrate and welcome differences within our school community. The ability to learn is underpinned by the teaching of basic skills, knowledge, concepts and values.
We constantly provide enhancement opportunities to engage learning and believe that childhood should be a happy, investigative and enquiring time in our lives where there are no limits to curiosity and there is a thirst for new experiences and knowledge.
Our school strapline is: "Where family and learning unite"
We promote positive attitudes to learning which reflect the values and skills needed to promote responsibility for learning and future success.
How we implement our curriculum
The Gisburn Road curriculum incorporates the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum 2014 and other experiences and opportunities which best meet the learning and developmental needs of the children in our school.
Progression
We have implemented a robustly sequenced curriculum to ensure progression of skills and knowledge for every subject in our primary curriculum. Our units of work are taught discreetly in order to focus on children developing key knowledge, so that they know more and remember more.
Our learning is rigorously sequenced through our units of work, ensuring prior learning securely feeds new learning. Over time our children develop a love of History, for History's sake; a curiosity within Science, for Science's sake... along with all the knowledge and skills across the breadth of subjects our curriculum offers.
Community
Community involvement is an essential part of our curriculum which celebrates local traditions and provides children with memorable experiences, in addition to diverse and rich opportunities from which children can learn and develop a range of transferable skills, enabling them to take an active role in local events throughout the year.
Making memories
Our school’s focus on curriculum development is being carefully designed to ensure coverage and progression. It provides pupils with memorable experiences, in addition to diverse and rich opportunities from which children can learn and develop a range of transferable skills. The children's own community is frequently used as a starting point for engaging interest.
Disadvantage
A primary focus of our curriculum is to raise aspirations, engender a sense of personal pride in achievement, and provide a purpose and relevance for learning. As the school serves a community where there is a high percentage of disadvantaged pupils, we provide activities that children may not otherwise experience. We recognise that the children need both a sense of valuing themselves, and developing aspirations for their future and for their community.
Subjects
Subject leaders play an important part in the success of the curriculum by leading a regular programme of monitoring, evaluation and review. They each collate evidence in subject leaders’ files and regularly hold pupil interviews in order to check on knowledge and skill acquisition.
Subjects are planned to ensure progression of knowledge and skills across school. Creatively produced topic books give children a sense of pride in the presentation of their work. High quality visits and visitors enhance the curriculum and provide opportunities for writing for a purpose.
Striving for excellence
Our school makes a conscious effort to engage with drives that will enable further development and excellence in specific areas and has achieved the ‘Primary Science Quality Mark’. The outdoor environment and the local community are considered an opportunity for active learning for all our children.
We are proud of our ‘Sainsburys GOLD award’ for quality Physical Education and encourage Active lifestyles, ensuring children understand the importance of making health lifestyle choices. The school grounds and local allotment have been developed so they can enrich different curriculum areas, particularly Science, and we proudly hold the ‘Food For Life’ Bronze Award.
Enrichment
To further promote physical health, well-being and mental health, a varied timetable for extra-curricular activities is offered by the school, with clubs that support the core curriculum offer, as well as those which develop specialist skills, such as Martial Arts, whilst also extending the range of children’s experiences.
Opportunity
A primary focus of our curriculum is to raise aspirations, engender a sense of personal pride in achievement, and provide a purpose and relevance for learning.
Our PSHE scheme (Live Well, Learn Well) provides children with opportunities to discuss and learn about personal health, well-being, mental health, safety, relationships (including anti-bullying work), differences and aspirations.
Pastoral
Our diversity work helps children to realise that everyone is special and unique and we should celebrate differences and different kinds of families. In recognising the development of the whole child the pastoral support given to children so they can access the curriculum is very strong. Our skilled Learning Mentors ensure various programmes of support are provided for children where a need has been identified such as self-esteem, anger management and bereavement.
Inclusion
The school takes pride in providing a highly inclusive environment, where learners demonstrate high levels of enjoyment in their education and most make very good progress in most subjects and areas of learning.
Children at all levels are helped to achieve their potential. Those who are most able are challenged and supported through being offered tasks which provide opportunities for greater depth and those who struggle are encouraged and given targeted support to embed skills, to develop at their own pace or simply to learn in a style that best suits their individual needs.
The impact of our curriculum
The innovative practice across the school provides a strong foundation and opportunities for children to collaborate and develop social skills both indoors and out. This curriculum design ensures that the needs of individual and small groups of children can be met within the environment of high quality teaching, supported by targeted, proven interventions where appropriate. In this way it can be seen to impact in a very positive way on children’s outcomes.
Enjoyment of the curriculum promotes achievement, confidence and good behaviour. Children feel safe to try new things. High quality visits and visitors to the school enhance the curriculum and provide opportunities for writing for a purpose.
Children have opportunities to share their learning with each other, their parents and carers and other learners through school-based and external exhibitions, performances, competitions and events involving other schools. Developing their independence and motivation as learners and their sense of responsibility as future citizens is at the heart of all our teaching and learning.
Children leave our school with a sense of belonging to a tightly knit community where they have the confidence and skills to make decisions, self-evaluate, make connections and become lifelong learners.
Overview: the curriculum year
Gisburn Road Community Primary School aims to provide all children with a broad and balanced curriculum. All pupils are taught in line with national requirements, and the teachers endeavour to enrich the children’s learning with purposeful and creative learning experiences.
The policy behind our curriculum
At Gisburn Road we believe that the curriculum is a powerful tool that promotes a love of learning and willingness to explore and the time to have fun.
We are proud to use the National Curriculum as a starting point for a wide and varied learning experience for our children. We enrich it by our strong ethos based on respect for ourselves and others, equality and a sense of wonder at the world we live in. We are committed to developing the whole child.
Our children will have the opportunity to be creative, to be physically active and to be academically challenged.
We are continually reviewing and improving the curriculum we offer to our children. The curriculum at Gisburn Road is evolving according to the needs of our children and to the aspirations of the staff and community.
The values within our curriculum
- We value the way in which all children are unique, and our curriculum promotes respect for the views of each individual child, as well as for people of all cultures.
- We value the spiritual and moral development of each person, as well as their intellectual and physical growth.
- We value the importance of each person in our community.
- We organise our curriculum so that we promote co-operation and understanding between all members of our community.
- We use the community to enrich the curriculum.
- We value the rights enjoyed by each person in our society.
- We respect each child in our school for who they are, and we treat them with fairness and honesty.
- We nurture each person to enable them to be successful, and we provide equal opportunities for all the children in our school.
- We value our environment, and we aim, through our curriculum, to teach respect for our world, and how we should care for it for future generations, as well as our own.
- We value parents and work in partnership with them to enrich the curriculum. Parents are informed about the curriculum through curriculum newsletters, home learning and shared learning experiences within topics. Parents are positively encouraged to become involved.
- We celebrate learning successes in our Friday assembly and by displaying children’s work.
What our curriculum aims to achieve
The aims of our school curriculum are:
- To enable all children to understand that they are all successful learners
- To enable children to understand the skills and attributes needed to be a successful learner
- To enable children to develop their own personal interests
- To promote a ‘CAN DO’ attitude towards learning, so that children enjoy coming to school, and acquire a solid basis for lifelong learning
- To teach children the basic skills of literacy, numeracy and computing
- To enable children to be creative through art, dance, music, drama and design technology
- To enable children to be healthy individuals who enjoy sport and appreciate the importance of a healthy life style
- To teach children about their developing world, including how their environment and society have changed over time
- To help children understand Britain’s cultural heritage and British Values
- To enable children to be positive citizens in society and to feel that they can make a difference
- To enable children to understand and respect other cultures
- To fulfil all the requirements of the National Curriculum and the Locally Agreed syllabus for Religious Education
- To teach children to have an awareness of their own spiritual development, and to understand right from wrong
- To help children understand the importance of truth and fairness, so that they grow up committed to equal opportunities for all
- To enable children to have respect for themselves and high self-esteem and to be able to live and work cooperatively with other
- To enable children to be active and take responsibility for their own health
- To enable a child to play a musical instrument
- To enable children to be passionate about what they believe in and to develop their own thinking
- To enable children to ask questions and take risks
- To enable children to develop their intellect including their emotional development.