Curriculum Design Intent

Curriculum Design Statement - Tithe Barn

At Tithe Barn, we believe in providing a first class education for all our pupils. We know that in order to achieve this, our children need to be happy, safe and inspired to learn during their time at school with us. We are committed to delivering a curriculum that inspires and challenges all our children so that they will leave Tithe Barn as knowledgeable, lifelong learners.

INTENT

  • CONNECT – our curriculum is designed to facilitate long-term learning. We know that we retain knowledge in our long term memory when there are well planned and sequenced links between subject areas, as well as between prior and new knowledge.
  • ENGAGE – our curriculum provides inspiring, active learning experiences that enable everybody to learn effectively alongside each other. We believe that our teaching and learning should be about teaching for long term memory not just creating memories for the children.
  • CHALLENGE – our curriculum challenges all learners to increase and widen their knowledge and vocabulary, so that they can grow into inquisitive, thoughtful young people.

 

IMPLEMENTATION

  • We have carefully re-designed our curriculum to meet the needs of our children. In order to do this we have scrutinised the National Curriculum, in addition to identifying what else we want our children to know by the time they leave us aged eleven. These two elements have been woven together into a progression of knowledge-based learning for each year group. There are planned and explicit links between year groups and different subject areas. This ensures that our children develop well organised and connected knowledge across a range of subjects.  Our curriculum promotes long-term learning which we believe means knowing more, and remembering more using this knowledge with increasing fluency and independence.
  • We are focused on the absolute belief that in almost all circumstances, every child can achieve. Therefore, teachers plan Maths and English mastery lessons to ensure that our expectations are high for all children and that anyone who is not on track will have same day interventions, rather than alternative objectives.  Whole class and teacher led learning is a regular feature of our lessons.
  • There is a topic focus for each term ( Y1 to Y6 ) and subject leaders have specified what we want our children to know in their subject area, within that topic. Subjects are taught discretely within the topic and may well be blocked together e.g. two week Geography block within a topic.  As the learning is spaced over time, we provide regular opportunities/tasks for the children to retrieve prior knowledge. If they have retained this knowledge, we know the knowledge has ‘stuck’and deep learning has taken place.
  • Our curriculum planning in EYFS focusses on the ELGs and we deliver these within a nurturing, child-led environment. We ensure that early reading, maths and writing opportunities are at the heart of our indoor and outdoor learning environments.
  • Our subject leaders support and guide teachers to ensure the children learn in a meaningful, planned way. They identify the subject specific vocabulary that should be taught within a topic, our children can then use this vocabulary to follow lines of enquiry and formulate opinions.
  • Children are given opportunities to learn in many different ways: with their weekly talk partner, in a group, independently or as a class. Learning is a collaborative experience in which everyone is supported. They engage very well with their peers and staff and this ensures that all children can access and make progress through our teaching.
  • Our resource pupils have a bespoke, personal curriculum and targets.  Depending on the needs of the individual children, learning might take place within the mainstream classroom alongside their peers or in our specialist resource base.

IMPACT

We measure the success of our curriculum by regularly assessing how much our children know in the different subject areas.  We believe that progress means knowing more and remembering more. We assess this progress through:

Scrutiny of children’s work.

Pupil voice

Retrieval practice – using end of topic quizzes to assess knowledge gains.

Formal and informal lesson observations

Summative formal/informal testing

 

 We aim for our children to leave our school as responsible, respectful and reflective learners.