Blakehill Primary School

Our Curriculum Design

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Our Curriculum

At Blakehill, we are uncompromising and ambitious in our vision for excellence and enjoyment for all pupils in all areas of the curriculum to ensure that our students have the knowledge, skills, understanding, attitudes and values to lead successful lives both now and in the future.

Leaders have a clear rationale for our curriculum design which is based on full coverage of the National Curriculum. It is designed to ensure that a pupil's learning is carefully sequenced; building on prior knowledge and skills; preparing them for success. Our aim is to provide a curriculum offer where pupils thrive; encouraging pupils to become independent, solution seeking and resilient learners who acquire the skills and knowledge that prepares them for the next stage of their education.

Our Curriculum continues to evolve to reflect the needs and interests of our learners. Careful consideration is given to the sequence of our curriculum. It is important that our pupils develop the knowledge and skills that enable them to make links within subjects and in other subjects across the curriculum. We believe that in reviewing our curriculum, we are able to tailor learning experiences to ensure that they are meaningful, relevant and purposeful for Blakehill children.

Long and medium term plans are in place for all subjects, along with progression ladders to give teachers guidance on how strands of knowledge and skills develop as children move through school.

Sequencing our curriculum

The knowledge that we want our pupils to learn and remember is identified on subject specific schemes of work. Our aim is for pupils to use their knowledge to understand and begin to explain the impact of certain events, people and actions; not just recall simple subject specific facts.

For instance, planning for a history topic on Titus Salt and the textile industry knowledge states that pupils should know that Titus Salt owned several mills in Bradford during the time of the industrial revolution. This was a time when technology had advanced to make machinery. Titus Salt employed lots of people to work the machinery in his mills.

Leaders carefully consider the conceptual knowledge pupils need for future learning. For example, with reference to the history unit outlined above, the planning could go on to include knowledge of the importance of migration/immigration, trade and/or the British Empire. Leaders have ensured that the learning within a topic and within a subject is well sequenced. We continue to develop our curriculum to ensure that consideration has been given to the sequencing between subjects so that pupils arrive at lessons with the knowledge they need. For example, in Design Technology, pupils may need prior knowledge of materials and measures in order to be successful in a particular unit. Therefore, Science and mathematical knowledge must be secure first.

As leaders, we understand that fundamental to securing excellent teaching and learning is to achieve consistency amongst our teaching staff. We use a series of non-negotiables: aspects of teaching and learning that have been identified as essential to raising performance and achievement and include classroom climate and professional characteristics. We are incredibly proud of our rigorous, well-planned curriculum, which, when combined with high quality teaching, ensures that pupils at Blakehill Primary School are supported in becoming solution seeking, well-rounded, empathetic young people who continue to thrive and have a genuine thirst for learning. Our pupils develop a strong sense of moral purpose in addition to a respect for and understanding of themselves and other people and their cultures.

How do we know that our pupils know more and remember more?

We use a range of strategies that help us to assess how children know and remember more across the curriculum. By using a range of strategies, we are able to provide ongoing and varied opportunities for pupils to recall and reflect on their learning, allowing teachers to see the big picture.

These strategies can be used in a variety of ways eg at the beginning of lessons, as part of the main body of a lesson, at the end of a unit of work, at the end of a term or even as discussion points at the beginning/ end of the day.

Here are some of the strategies we use to assess how children know and can remember more:

Use our class pages as a prompt to discussions about previous learning,
Mini quizzes
KWL grids
video clips of children discussing their learning,
End of topic 'The Big Question' outcome,
Teacher written questions as part of our feedback, prompting further/deeper thought and understanding,
Spider diagrams that are added to throughout a topic/ unit
Working walls
End of unit tests
Weekly tests/ quiz
Recap learning at the beginning of lessons
Pupil voice outcomes
The use of our dialogic teaching discussion topics

100% of our parents at Blakehill agree with the statement:

‘The pupils at Blakehill receive a broad curriculum and have many opportunities to engage in enrichment opportunities’. ( 2019)

Please take a look at our individual class pages, our curriculum area and subject specific links on our website for further evidence of this.

Non negotiables teaching and learning.pdf

Long Term Plans

Please look at the following documents in order to see our long term plans across the school and for each subject area.

Should parents wish to obtain any further information relating to the curriculum, please click on the link below which will take you to the government's National Curriculum website:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum