Curriculum

Curriculum Drivers website1

Intent 
BELIEVE: THRIVE: LEARN: SHINE

We offer St Andrew’s Curriculum Story from EYFS – Year 6 that delivers a secure base of knowledge for our youngsters. Learning of skills that is delivered in sensible bite size pieces allowing pupils to build on their prior knowledge, secure the necessary components in each subject and make steady progress throughout their school life.

Our ‘knowledge rich and embedded skills’ approach will allow our youngsters to reach the end of the story here ready to confidently open the pages of the next one, fully prepared and excited for what comes next…

Through our BELIEVE SYSTEM we have woven our school values and development of learning behaviours.  As children move through our school, they are reminded daily what it takes to live effectively as a contributor to a ‘Thriving Learning Community’.

We believe in the power of yet! And strive to have a mindset that enables us to grow as learners, reach out for the support of others and recognise the strength that comes from working alongside each other. We place a high priority on MHWB, have an excellent SENCO, a trained MHWB Senior practitioner and offer nurture/ELSA sessions to a considerable number of children and seek to support them and their families by drawing on local support networks.

We welcome visitors and seek to provide our children with a range of stimulating and inspiring, challenging, and thought-provoking members of the wider community. We have created (from September 2022) a St Andrew’s Experience Offer that complements and layers up our day-to-day curriculum. We want our children to experience as much from others and amazing places as they possibly can in their time with us. We strive to fill their learning with opportunities that embrace the arts, local events, people of interest, cultural moments, awe inspiring content, historical places, local community life etc. We draw the Fontmell community in to work with us as we continue to grow links with the church, our families, and any wider Dorset or national opportunities.

Implementation

As we implement the St Andrew’s curriculum, we recognise that we are creating a NEW story for the youngsters here. We are keen to keep some central themes that are important to our community.

Threaded through all we do are our curriculum drivers, agreed collectively by our teaching team. These are COMMUNICATION, COMMUNITY and the ENVIRONMENT these key drivers feel wholly appropriate for this period in our children’s lives. These are chosen for this time in a period of uncertainty in the world around us and as crucial factors in the children’s lives. A language rich and community focused curriculum feels right to us here and now. With an eye fixed firmly on the collective impact we are having and the positive one we could have on the wider world around us by gaining more knowledge and the skills to go beyond our local area and make a difference. You can see evidence of each of our curriculum drivers by clicking here.

All lessons will follow the subject scheme of learning as directed by the Curriculum/Subject Leader. Schemes of learning are strategically designed to build on prior learning with lessons that are sequentially planned so that students learn more and can do more by the close of their learning with us. All students experience quality first teaching delivered through our Teaching and Learning rubric.  The rubric provides a research informed structure to our teaching whilst allowing our teachers to be creative and personalise the learning to the needs of each student. St Andrews Teaching Rubric

To enable us to fully implement the curriculum we  have accessed some resources to aid the teaching. You will find schemes that we have chosen to support the teaching of maths, computing, Music, PSHE, RSE. We use Accelerated Reader to help us monitor the standards in reading and assign appropriate texts in KS2. We use Read Write Inc for phonics.

Our commitment to Collective Worship and Thought for the week allow us to connect around our Christian core as a community. Class and whole school worship times are valued and respected as times that we can learn and grow together; our values permeate these times; creative, spiritual and reflective thinking is encouraged from every child here.

We welcome visitors and seek to provide our children with a range of stimulating and inspiring, challenging, and thought-provoking members of the wider community. Every term in every class we intend to include an educational visit to somewhere that enhances the learning or invite someone in who can add value to the learning taking place in school. We want our children to experience as much from others and amazing places as they possibly can in their time with us. We intend to fill their learning with opportunities that embrace the arts, local events, people of interest, cultural moments, awe inspiring content, historical places, local community life etc. We intend to draw the Fontmell community in to work with us and grow the links with the church, our families, and any wider Dorset or national opportunities we can. We will access through Virtual Reality equipment places beyond our local reach because it is vital we are outward looking.

We are comfortable with teaching subjects as part of our projects recognising the importance of making links in learning and skills, but we also teach subjects discreetly where necessary. we do not implement our curriculum using tenuous links where this will detract from the focus. PE, SCARF, music and MFL are often not taught through our themes and CORE RE, and Maths can often be seen taught discreetly. Where English and Science works well in a topic it is taught this way; at times these subjects are also taught separately. Our implementation is our story; how it is told is important to us and we are beginning to tell it in a way that makes sense to us all.

Impact (outcomes)
We will know we are THRIVING when:
We feel positive about ourselves and have faith
We show courageous advocacy and are not afraid to ‘step up’
We feel safe, cared for, and listened to
We can express ourselves and share our emotions
We feel able to reflect and reach out to each other
We have a community that works together for the good of all
We share the ‘good days’ and the ‘not so good days’ and it feels ok
The adults here show they are genuinely bothered about us and want the very best for us.

We will see great LEARNING through:
Improving outcomes
Being able to reflect on what have seen in history and make better choice
Visibly making progress in all we do
Positive classroom behaviour and active learning behaviours
Engaged and hardworking young people
Embracing our mistakes, and learning from them with a positive mindset
Wanting to work hard and pushing through when it is tricky
Not putting a ceiling on what we can achieve
We are curious and seek to know more
We are showing creativity
We communicate effectively and are ‘vocabulary rich’
We have knowledge embedded in our long-term memories

We will recognise when we SHINE because:
We will want to celebrate our achievements
Our school community will celebrate with us
We are making a difference in our school and our community
We care deeply about our environment, our impact on it and our role in protecting it
Other people around us will also shine because we share our successes
We will look outward to what is around us and invite others in to share
Our school will be full of contented young learners and people will want to come here
We will display honesty, courage, kindness, and respect, be loving and persevere.

If you would like to see some subject-specific evidence of some of our outcomes then please click here.

If you would like to find out more please information about our curriculum, please contact the school office: office@standrewsfontmell.co.uk