Curriculum Intent
At Victoria Road Primary and Nursery, our vision is to provide our children with an engaging, exciting, broad and balanced curriculum that is sequenced to build upon prior learning. We promote their development by instilling a lifelong love and capacity for learning. The curriculum in the school is designed to provide rich, practical and broad experiences for children to develop their knowledge and skills inside of the classroom and beyond.
Through enrichment activities, children are provided with opportunities to learn new and build upon knowledge and skills, whilst applying what is taught in new and exciting ways. Our knowledge rich curriculum is aspirational, relevant and purposeful. This is to provide opportunities for our children to develop as independent, confident and successful learners who know how to make a positive contribution to their wider community and society. We aim to teach children the core knowledge of the National Curriculum and the skills needed to both access and demonstrate their learning in a range of ways. The curriculum is designed to: recognise children's learning, provide first-hand learning experiences, allow children to develop interpersonal skills, build resilience and become creative, independent and critical thinkers.
Our approach to the curriculum is to build an in-depth knowledge within each subject area making connections wherever possible between the subjects. We are proud of our global dimension and international links which provide children with contrasting experiences to broaden their understanding of the world.
We aim to provide children with the cultural capital needed to not only understand, but thrive and engage, with the world through passion and purpose building on the essential British (Human) Values.
We take a holistic view of the child and understand the importance of being ‘ready to learn’. We aim to effectively address the learning, behavioural, social-emotional and mental health needs of children and families. Children enjoy learning and feel safe, happy and secure. Children and families feel empowered to share their thoughts and feelings and so they can be resilient to barriers to success. At Victoria Road Primary School, children and families are supported by a dedicated team. Every child is recognised as a unique individual.
The school is proud to say that we move ‘Forward Together’.
Implementation
Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it:
1) Learning is most effective when spaced rather than blocked, with a tiered and layered approach.
2) Interweaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
3) Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
In addition to the three principles we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term and that sustained mastery takes time.
Some of our content is subject-specific, whilst other content is combined in a cross-curricular approach. Our continuous curriculum is planned and sequenced to build on prior knowledge and understanding. In lessons, children have the opportunity to recap learning so that they are able to integrate it into their long-term memory.
Impact
The impact of our curriculum ensures that the knowledge and skills which the children acquire and the end of each topic, year group and key stage, enables them to have a depth of understanding. We monitor pupils carefully to ensure that they are on track to reach the expectations of our curriculum.
Subject and school leaders scrutinise the impact of our curriculum provision, through completing monitoring that includes listening to the voices of our children.