Intent
At Bathford Church School our vision of ‘Grow, Care, Serve, Share’ and associated values of ‘Be Your Best, Be Kind, Be Respectful, Be a Team’ drive our broad and balanced curriculum. We aim to help our children to grow by equipping them with the knowledge, skills and values they need both to make sense of the world and to become caring, responsible global citizens.
Research, professional development, children and parent voice activities and reflection ensure our curriculum offer is ambitious, provokes the children’s care and concern and meets the needs of our community.
Grow: Our curriculum provides opportunities for children both to grow their learning as well as to grow as people. Our layered approach to planning, using overarching whole school themes, links children’s learning to our school vision and values and supports children to transfer new learning to long-term memory. The teaching of knowledge and skills is well sequenced so that children grow incrementally, learning to do more and remember more. We nurture, celebrate, enrich and inspire children to develop a positive self-story and good mental health. Opportunities for high-quality play, joy, awe and wonder enrich the spirit of the child. We aim to develop children who understand the purpose of learning and are engaged, self-motivated and reflective learners. We promote the creative and critical thinking skills, perseverance and resilience that our children need to embrace the challenges and opportunities they encounter.
Care: Cross-curricular topics which link to whole school themes make learning irresistible for children and leads them to care and be concerned about their learning. Children develop a clear understanding of our Be Your Best, Be Kind, Be Respectful, Be a Team values. Equality and diversity are embedded into the curriculum design through our overarching themes such that our curriculum explicitly addresses negative stereotyping through investigating similarities and differences and promoting acceptance, diversity, citizenship and human rights.
Serve: Our curriculum promotes thinking as a global citizen, enabling children to make deep connections between their learning, our local context and the world they live in. We support children to become active, collaborative and responsible global citizens. Three key global learning themes underpin our curriculum: Sustainable development, Social Justice and Identity and Diversity. Each of these themes is broken down into knowledge, skills and values and across each year a number of high-quality core texts are used to bring the themes to life for our children.
Share: Children are given the opportunity to discuss, debate and communicate, developing a shared connection to one another, to our community, our local environment, the natural world and the wider world.
We are pleased to share our curriculum long-term plans with parents. These documents provide an overview of the learning that children will experience throughout the academic year in each subject.
Our curriculum has been carefully designed to ensure full coverage of the National Curriculum from Years 1 to 6, while also reflecting our school’s values and curriculum drivers of Identity & Diversity, Social Justice & Equity, and Sustainable Development. Learning has been planned progressively so that knowledge and skills build over time, allowing children to revisit and deepen their understanding as they move through the school.
As some of our classes are mixed-age, our curriculum has been carefully mapped to ensure that all pupils receive the same breadth and depth of learning throughout their time at school. The sequence of learning is designed around the journey children make as they move through each class, building knowledge and skills progressively over time. Additional units have been included where necessary to ensure full curriculum coverage, particularly for children who join the sequence in Year 3, so that no aspect of the curriculum is missed and all pupils access the same curriculum entitlement by the end of Year 6.
Reception follows the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) framework, which is different from the National Curriculum followed in Key Stages 1 and 2. In Reception, learning is organised through the EYFS areas of learning and planned towards the Early Learning Goals (ELGs), which describe the knowledge, skills and understanding children are expected to develop by the end of the Reception year. The Reception long-term plans therefore show how children develop these foundations through a balance of play-based learning, direct teaching, exploration and practical experiences.
Please note that these plans provide an overview of intended learning. Teachers may adapt aspects of the curriculum to respond to children’s interests, current events and opportunities that arise throughout the year, ensuring learning remains engaging, relevant and purposeful.
Design and Technology Long Term Plan
If you would like any further information about the curriculum, please contact the headteacher [email protected]