Wider Curriculum

Our Approach:

In Autumn 2018, a working party of staff across Bridge Schools began developing our Trust approach to the Curriculum.
We began our journey with research into: What is a curriculum? How is it designed? Who should be consulted?

We reflected on the findings from key research papers and the work of notable educationalists for example:
- The National Curriculum Review of 2010 by Tom Oates, focusing on deep learning, with learners able to retain and transfer knowledge
- The work of David Didau
- The work of John Hattie
- The knowledge and skills debate: including using previous knowledge as building blocks, effectively developing long term memory and skills defined as the children’s capacity to perform
- Ofsted documentation around curriculum: What is our Intent, Implementation and Impact? What is special about our locality and how should this be included within our curriculum?

From this we have devised a knowledge rich curriculum, based on the National Curriculum programmes of study, which sequences knowledge, concepts and skills. We believe it is vitally important that children develop secure understanding of each key block of knowledge in order to progress to the next stage as insecure, superficial understanding will not allow genuine progression.

We view knowledge as encompassing not only established facts, but also concepts, ideas, themes and theories. These different forms of subject specific knowledge interlink and are mutually dependent.

Through our curriculum, children:

• learn key subject specific facts and vocabulary

• build knowledge developed through the understanding of concepts and generalisations, enabling pupils to identify processes, different perspectives and values

• experience high quality enquiry, having the opportunity to make decisions and problem solve

• have the opportunity to engage mentally with questions about people, society, environment and the planet. This means they identify, assimilate, analyse and communicate data of various kinds, and learn the skills to do so productively

• learn how to think and act like a subject specific practitioner

Researchers have emphasised the growing importance of being able to understand, interpret and apply knowledge in various situations (OECD Future of Education and Skills 2019). This is why we link some of our subject specific teaching through an enquiry question.

Our use of an enquiry question secures pupil engagement and supports knowledge being embedded in long term memory.

Below you will find our curriculum progress ladders which help us ensure we teach age appropriate knowledge which builds on previous learning. Because at Blisland our classes contain a number of year groups, we use a detailed rolling programme to support us in delivering this curriculum. There is a 2 year rolling programme in place for KS1 and a 4 year rolling programme in place for KS2.

Our curriculum progress ladders include tier 3 vocabulary to support children's vocabulary development and we have recently adopted progression maps for oracy. These can be found below.

Assessing the wider curriculum and embedding knowledge in long term memory

To help us support all children to progress well in the wider curriculum subjects, whatever their starting points, we use formative assessment over the course of a unit of work to help shape the learning. These formative assessment opportunties are then used to form a summative judgement at the end of the unit which captures to what extent children have achieved the planned learning objectives. This is captured on subject assessment ladders.
Formative assessment is an integral part of our lessons and is also designed to support children to recall knowledge, link it to other learning and help embed it in their long term memories.
Class forums provide an opportunity to share what children have learned and what helped them to be successful. In KS2 we use Padlet for this so children can type their answers, upload a voice recording or a video. This means everyone has a way to contribute.