Intent
What is our Intent? What are we trying to achieve with our curriculum?
“Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart”, Colossians 3:23
At John Fletcher of Madeley, we ensure the individual pupil is at the heart of everything we do, taking into account background, SEND, ability, based on our key Christian Values:
Hope and Aspiration “We believe we can”
- To inspire our learners and the community to see learning as a joy: a gateway to a successful future.
- To develop flourishing learners – with children recognising and building their new knowledge.
- To ensure that pupils have experiences beyond their normal range to allow them to have new experiences and develop life skills.
Resilience and Perseverance “We know we can”
- To allow children to learn about themselves as learners and thinkers: to have a positive mindset and be able to have the self-belief to work through something when it is difficult.
- To develop pupils that are able to learn for themselves and respond positively to challenges.
Compassion and Forgiveness “Together we can”
- Recognising that everyone is different and everyone is precious, we want to foster a safe learning environment by supporting our school community to love each other unconditionally, taking care of each other and our environment.
Implementation
How do we deliver our curriculum?
To ensure effective delivery of the curriculum, we have identified the statutory requirements for each subject within a key stage and cross-curricular links have been harnessed to provide cohesion within units of learning. This is outlined in our new curriculum maps. Progression is achieved by identifying the knowledge that children need over time. We have highlighted these in our progression grids for each subject, which contain carefully chosen components crucial for subsequent learning and where key areas for overlearning are identified. This provides what we as a school want pupils to know and be able to do by the time that they leave our school.
Our aims for the delivery of the curriculum is based on evidence from cognitive science and the following main principles that underpin effective learning:
- The importance of knowledge acquisition through meaningful and memorable experiences
- Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
In addition to the above principles we also understand that learning in the short-term needs to be repeated and revisited as sustained learning takes time.
We ask four key questions in our lessons to ensure children base their learning on what they already know so that new knowledge is links to existing knowledge to create the strong memory links and therefore encourage the transfer of learning form the short to the long-term memory:
- What knowledge do I have and need to recall?
- What am I learning? (new learning or consolidations of prior learning)
- Why am I learning it? (connect the learning)
- How have I been successful? What do I know now, or can do better, than I could before?
Impact
What is the Impact of our curriculum? What difference is our curriculum making to our pupils?
Our school leaders, governors and teachers regularly measure the impact of our curriculum through the monitoring of teaching and learning, monitoring of behaviour, assessment and on-going self review. We talk to children and parents, we undertake learning walks, we look at books and we review the curriculum as subject leaders. We want to offer a broad and balanced curriculum that enables our children to know and remember more, through connecting prior learning. We aim that the impact will be that children will be prepared for the next phase of their education with a growing knowledge base, are motivated to succeed and are equipped with all the personal skills to do this.
The curriculum is currently under review. Planning grids will updated as they are developed and can be found on the individual Subject Pages.
REMOTE LEARNING
Our remote learning information is below:
Remote learning document 2021 2022