Curriculum
St Tudy 'WE CAN' Curriculum
Intent, Implementation and Impact
Quality of Education
St Tudy’s bespoke ‘WE CAN’ curriculum is broad and balanced, taking into account our school’s unique characteristics. We pride ourselves on being an inclusive school, where each member of the class is able to access the lesson and reach their potential.
The school adopts a ‘Creative’ approach to the delivery of the curriculum throughout the school from the Foundation Stage to Upper Key Stage 2, which enhances cross-curricular links, providing practical, real-life experiences, while ensuring that contexts and challenges generate curiosity interest and interaction. Processes and procedures enable all adults to utilise, effectively, a child-centred approach to learning founded on the fundamental principles of skills-based learning. Our curriculum is co-designed by Head of School, teachers and children, where our child led based approach enables children to lead and teachers to facilitate the learning. Examples include topic are ‘Who am I?’ and ‘Wonderful Woodlands’ and Awesome Egyptians ‘.
The school uses a flexible creative planning system that is based upon the development of skills, knowledge and understanding, which enables adults to provide well differentiated, challenging and meaningful contexts for learning. Thus enabling all learners to successfully make progress gaining new skills and knowledge that they understand, can internalise and apply appropriately to new and challenging situations.
The provision of interactive and challenging learning environments both in and out of doors engages and stimulates learners’ desire to learn.
Behaviour and Attitudes
Our child-led approach to the curriculum ensures that pupil engagement levels are high, which is reflected in the school’s continued high attendance levels. Safeguarding is embedded deep into our curriculum, teaching children about how to keep themselves safe in the modern world. Parents and children tell us that they feel safe in school.
Hope and aspirations
Our curriculum has a strong Christian underpinning; it is linked closely with the Church of England’s Vision for Education using our drivers of ‘ WE CAN’ and the recognition of Jesus’ promise of ‘life in all its fullness’. Also teaching the children that we are able to achieve anything we put our minds too. This includes the pursuit of excellence for preparing our children to achieve the highest academic standards at the end of each Key Stage, whilst also preparing them to be world citizens of the 21st century.
We build children’s aspirations, demonstrating possibilities for their future lives. For example, our aspiration assemblies, local authors visited, police dog handlers, World’s tallest basketballer. We recognise RE as a core subject and we follow ‘Understanding Christianity’ in addition to a broad multi-faith curriculum. Our values underpin all that we do in school, fostering independence and resilience.
Personal Development
Mental health and well being are prioritised within our curriculum design, allowing children opportunities to exhibit spiritual, moral, social and cultural understanding. To promote healthy lifestyles, the school has invested in a range of facilities, for example: the recent development Early Years outdoor learning environment, the new park in our community playing field and our weekly OAA sessions. We feel that our dedication to supporting the mental and physical wellbeing of our children is reflected through our TIS approach across the School. We partake in the ‘daily mile’ as we believe in active children active minds
Implementation
Our carefully crafted curriculum balances the national expectations and an all-encompassing range of experiences allowing our children to flourish. Our ’50 things to do before you leave St Tudy’ has been developed with teachers and Head of School and has enabled us to personalise our curriculum to our school and its learner.
Clear strategic planning allows the curriculum to be dynamic and adapt to the context of the school and our unique local environment. Age related expectations combine the acquisition of knowledge and development of skills to create a purposeful and exciting learning journey for every child. The curriculum has high expectations to combine transferable skills, demonstrate a breadth of vocabulary and develop strong cross curricular links. New excellent classroom environments stimulate and engage quality thinking and reasoning. We support our children’s physical well being through providing sports coaching from external professionals and take part in numerous competitions and sports festivals, such as the local football and netball leagues, tag rugby tournaments and badminton competitions through our Multi academy trust.
Impact
St Tudy has only developed their curriculum this year but we plan to use rigorous triangulated monitoring throughout the year to gauge the impact of the curriculum design. As a small team, all staff have been part of this process and have been given areas of the curriculum that they will monitor: reviewing learning, evaluating pupil voice, providing individual feedback to move practice forward, celebrating positives and highlighting areas of development that through coaching. Our whole school team strengthen our ethos and vision as we work together to reflect upon our curriculum and share outcomes driving forward next steps.