Our staff have designed an ambitious, broad curriculum, which is designed to ensure success for every single child no matter their background or needs. It ensures that every child has full access to the national curriculum and provides key threads throughout subjects to ensure all children can revisit and embed their learning. Through our mastery approach (Dive Deeper and Explain, Change, Create), we ensure that planning is ambitious enough to challenge our most able learners and rich enough to close the cultural gap for our most disadvantaged children. To fulfil this, we embed cultural capital throughout our units to ensure that there are meaningful learning experiences for our children, which allow them to build upon prior knowledge and skills. This will allow them to be a successful part of the community as they grow.
In order to develop our curriculum, we started with our overall intent for our curriculum: what do we want for our learners at South Farnborough and why this is key for our children in our community? To discover the answer, we looked in greater depth at barriers for our school community. From these barriers, we created our overall aim:
Embracing our values today, to be a successful part of the world tomorrow!
Following this, we worked with our staff at all levels to think about what this meant for their curriculum. Whether this is learning from the past to create successful future in history, or learning about how design impacts culture in subjects like art and design technology.
To implement this, staff considered the key knowledge, skills and learning threads for their subjects and sequenced their curriculums in order to embed this thoroughly for the pupils. We had training around pedagogical content knowledge to ensure that staff not only considered the subject knowledge and general pedagogy to plan their curriculum, but to think about how this is taught effectively within their subjects. At the heart of our long-term plans, all staff considered the key questions of why this? why now?
Since developing this curriculum, our staff have not stood still. We have continued to review and refine our curriculum. Subject leaders have developed medium term plans and are developing the use of programmes such as Earwig, across the school to develop our practice further.
In order to measure the impact of our curriculum, subject leaders and teachers at all levels have worked alongside the SLT to develop a thorough and robust system for assessing pupils across all subjects. Every child has the right to be successful in their learning and in order to do this, we assess against knowledge and skills taught in individual subject areas and use assessment descriptors to ensure accuracy and consistency of judgements. This means that we can adapt to meet the emerging needs of our pupils and drive progress.
Continual CPD is embedded within our practice to ensure that we continue to strive for the very best for our pupils.
To find out more about our curriculum, please see the links below.