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Gretton Primary School

BWT Curriculum

Brooke Weston Trust – Primary Curriculum Rationale

Mission

The purpose of Brooke Weston Trust is to transform educational performance in the communities where we work through our long-term commitment to improve student achievement by removing the barriers to learning and providing opportunities for personal development.

Vision

We want to give all our students the best start in life academically and as citizens. Above all, we want them to be highly literate, able to access all the learning necessary to prepare them for a complex, changing, technological and competitive world

We want all our students to be ambitious for themselves and about their futures. We will provide the pathways and support for them to realise their ambitions.

Through a strong culture of positive relationships built on core principles of ‘the Brooke Weston Way’, we will know all our students well and care about them enough to challenge them enough.

We want all our students to be physically and mentally healthy. We want them to develop the confidence and personal values to make good choices and build successful relationships with others from similar and different backgrounds. To do this we must provide them with the breadth of cultural capital to be responsible and tolerant citizens who make a positive contribution to society.

BWT Core Values Across the Primary Curriculum

Improving the life chances of all pupils

  • Ambition for All
    Our curriculums will be ambitious and developmental for every child. There will be no excuses in seeking out and creating pathways to personal growth and the best academic success possible for every child.
  • High Expectations
    Our curriculums are planned and delivered to the highest standards, quality assured by those with deep subject expertise and have reading as a top priority.
  • Excellent Teaching and Support
    Our curriculums will be brought to life by imaginative, engaging and effective teaching building knowledge, skills and character.
  • Working Together
    Our curriculums will be fashioned and refreshed through collaboration and use of the best subject expertise.
  • Contribute to Society
    All our curriculums will provide opportunities for students to learn about and make meaningful contributions to their local community and global challenges.

Our starting point

The National Curriculum provides pupils with an introduction to the essential knowledge and skills that they need to be educated citizens. It introduces pupils to the best that has been thought and said and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement. It provides a core foundation of knowledge around which schools have developed their stimulating bespoke curriculum developing pupils’ knowledge, skills and understanding. Each curriculum has been refined with the support of local stakeholders to meet the specific needs and opportunities of each school’s unique context and community.

Our Collective Destination

All BWT Primary Schools are ambitious for their pupils to be successful, confident, engaged and responsible young people with the attributes to succeed and contribute in the wider world.

Successful individuals
with a love of learning who

  • Have essential skills of reading, read for pleasure and become lifelong readers;
  • Communicate effectively in a variety of ways with a rich vocabulary;
  • Are motivated and determined to reach their full potential, now and in the future;
  • Are open to new thinking and ideas;
  • Able to learn independently and collaboratively, as part of a team;
  • Have enquiring minds and think for themselves to process information, reason, question and evaluate;
  • Are creative, innovative and resourceful, able to identify and solve problems in ways that draw upon a range of learning areas;
  • Know about big ideas and events that shape our world.
  • Appreciate the beauty, awe and wonder of the world.

Confident individuals
with the skills to contribute and thrive in an ever-changing world, who

  • Have a sense of self-worth, self-awareness and personal identity that enables them to manage their emotional, mental, spiritual and physical wellbeing;
  • Relate well to others and maintain good relationships;
  • Become increasingly independent and able to take the initiative;
  • Make healthy lifestyle choices;
  • Take managed risks and stay safe;
  • Are willing to try new things and make the most of opportunities;
  • Have a sense of optimism about their lives and the future;
  • Develop personal values and attributes such as honesty, empathy and respect for others.

Engaged individuals
with persistence, resilience, creativity and enthusiasm, who

  • Have a determination to learn and overcome obstacles;
  • Embrace challenge and the learning opportunities offered them;
  • Aspire to be the best they can be;
  • Mutually respect and trust themselves and others;
  • Collaboratively pursue excellence;
  • Actively involve and immerse themselves in school and community life;
  • Celebrate uniqueness and being part of one school and Trust family;
  • Are intrinsically motivated to be the best they can be.

Responsible individuals
making a positive contribution to society, who

  • Are prepared for their role as a family member, in their community and life in modern Britain;
  • Have secure values and beliefs and have principles to distinguish right from wrong;
  • Understand their own and others’ cultures and traditions within British Heritage, and have a strong sense of their own place in the world;
  • Co-operate with others;
  • Respect others and act with integrity;
  • Appreciate diversity;
  • Sustain and improve the environment, locally and globally.

The tickets For Our Collective Destination

  1. Prioritising reading across our curriculum. The engagement with wonderful children’s literature and high-quality texts is at the heart of our curriculum design and all our teaching;
  2. Prioritising the development of children’s vocabulary and spoken language, with Tier 2 & Tier 3 vocabulary will be taught explicitly;
  3. Prioritising and creating advantage over disadvantage ensuring all children have a ‘cultural capital’ entitlement of ’50 before 11’ which is uniquely devised to embrace the natural world, the arts, citizenship and enterprise;
  4. Prioritising the highest quality learning and developmental experiences both in an out of the classroom, ensuring staff and children are challenged, engaged and enthusiastic participants in all learning sequences across all subjects;
  5. Prioritising understanding wellbeing in relation to physical and mental health and managing risk effectively to keep themselves safe;

BWT Primary Schools’ Curriculum Offer

Each school will incorporate the Brooke Weston Trust core values within their curriculum offer and articulate explicitly how these will be promoted within their school. Schools will ensure they deliver on our collective curriculum priorities. They will publish core information to meet website compliance standards including details of how the school will implement the curriculum for each subject area and each year group.

Each school will be clear how their curriculum is of high quality with good coverage for every subject which sequentially and cumulatively develops strong pupil knowledge, understanding and skills. Each school must be explicit and clear how progression occurs throughout the academic year and across their different year groups.

Each school will be explicit in stating how their curriculum plan eliminates gaps in learning. Where these occur, or are evident on entry, swift and impactful interventions are actioned to close the gap as a priority.

Each school will provide its staff with relevant and effective CPD to develop and sustain expert subject knowledge and pedagogy driving effective planning, delivery and assessment. Each school will care enough to challenge to address misconceptions, remove barriers to learning and provide appropriate challenge for all pupils.

BWT’s Curriculum Support Offer For, By, And Through Our Primary Schools

BWT is totally committed to helping its primary schools provide a broad, balanced, rich and vibrant curriculum. We want to see curriculums that excite and motivate our children, enabling them to develop confidence in themselves as independent, enthusiastic life-long learners. We believe that children respond best when they enjoy ownership of their learning, when learning experiences are connected, relevant and achieved through practical, purposeful, active learning every day. We understand that ensuring vocabulary, skills, knowledge and understanding is committed to long term memory is fundamental to creating successful learners.

BWT promises to provide support and quality assurance to its schools through a variety of resources including:

  • An experienced Primary Executive Principal;
  • Subject development groups and Primary Directors of Subject; (Mathematics, English, SEND & Curriculum)
  • A dedicated Teaching School offer aligned with the requirements of our schools;
  • A Leadership Academy programme for aspiring leaders across our primary schools;
  • Identifying and sharing high quality expertise from within BWT across all our schools;
  • The very best external partners challenge our practice and thinking including ex HMI, BWT Ed. Stand. Cttee.
  • A Primary School Improvement Fund for deployment by the Executive Principal in conjunction with schools;
  • Trust-wide moderation and standardisation at all levels, as well as access to external benchmarking (PiXL, etc.)
  • Strong governance support across all primary schools;
  • Standardised templates for operational and management functions.

BWT Subject Specific Curriculum Priorities 

Reading is prioritised across our curriculum. The engagement with children’s literature and high-quality texts across the full range of subjects is genuinely at the heart of our curriculum design and all our teaching.  We intend every child to leave as an enthusiastic reader with the ability to articulate their learning and access the full curriculum. We place a high focus on developing children’s vocabulary and spoken language.

Reading

Writing

Vocabulary & Communication

  • Promote a love of reading.
  • Immersion in a rich diet of literature.
  • Automaticity of fluent reading.
  • Engage in and respond to rich, high quality texts.
  • Make meaningful connections across ideas and texts.
  • Understand a variety of texts.
  • Make inferences and deductions.
  • Understand how authors’ express their ideas.
  • Engage the community to enrich reading opportunities.
  • Write with purpose.
  • Write imaginatively, creatively appropriate to the genre.
  • Edit, draft and improve their writing.
  • Create vivid and descriptive images.
  • Organise writing appropriately.
  • Use accurate sentence structure and punctuation.
  • Write fluently and legibly with a personal style.
  • Apply strong and accurate grammatical knowledge.
  • Independently apply spelling of age appropriate words
  • Provide a language-rich environment.
  • Articulate and use technical vocabulary across the curriculum.
  • Carefully listen and demonstrate understanding.
  • Varied use of adventurous and interesting vocabulary.
  • Speak with confidence and clarity.
  • Express ideas and contribute to conversations and debates.
  • Explore morphology and etymology.
  • Accurately apply higher-tier vocabulary

Enquiry, investigation, fluency, reasoning, using, applying, practical, concrete, abstract & pictorial resources, reasoning, problem solving

Mathematics

Science

  • Deep understanding of mathematical concepts – depth not breadth
  • Making connections and reason mathematically
  • Fluent in the fundamentals of mathematics
    • Variety and frequent practice
    • Strong arithmetic knowledge
    • Secure and instant recall of times table facts
    • Fluent in written methods for all four operations
  • Opportunities for reasoning and problem solving in context
  • Use of concrete, pictorial and abstract methods
  • Application of mathematical understanding to real life contexts
  • Understanding and confident use of mathematical vocabulary
  • Articulation of mathematical strategies and presenting mathematical justifications
  • Investigate the living world and explore how animals, humans and plants live
  • Understand how materials have different uses based on their properties
  • Identify forces in different environments
  • Answer scientific questions about the world around them
  • Draw conclusions from evidence accurately
  • Use scientific equipment appropriately

Geography

History

MFL

  • Develop map skills and apply these in order to complete a successful journey
  • Make meaningful connections between themselves and their locality
  • Have an understanding of how actions impact on the environment
  • Ask questions about their local environment
  • Investigate and research key historical events
  • Make personal connections and comparisons with the past
  • Understand chronology of significant eras or events
  • Critically evaluate sources of evidence
  • speak with increasing confidence, fluency and spontaneity
  • Can write at varying length, for different purposes
  • Be able to hold conversations and respond appropriately

Design Technology

Art

Music

  • Construct for a specific purpose using a variety of materials
  • Experience how plants grow and can be harvested.
  • Prepare food or ingredients safely and hygienically
  • Design, make and evaluate a product
  • Use a range of tools confidently and safely
  • Produce creative work, exploring their ideas and working from observation and imaginatively
  • Become proficient in drawing, painting, printing, sculpture and textiles
  • Evaluate and analyse creative works using the language of art and design
  • Know about great artists, craft makers and designers
  • Perform, listen to, and evaluate music across a range of genres and traditions
  • Learn to sing and to use their voices, to create and compose music on their own and with others
  • Have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument
  • Understand and explore how music is created using musical vocabulary such as pitch and tempo

Physical Education

Computing

Religious Education

  • Develop competence to excel in a broad range of physical activities
  • Physically active for sustained periods of time
  • Engage in competitive sports and activities.
  • Lead healthy, active lives
  • Write algorithms and represent data
  • Practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve problems
  • Responsible, competent, confident and creative users of information and communication technology.
  • Understand how to use technology and social media safely
  • Knowledge of world religions develops tolerance
  • Understand how beliefs and attitudes influence action
  • Celebrating religious differences within our community

PHSCE

SMSC

Enrichment

  • Tackling challenges in our school and local communities
  • Develop self-assurance by adopting a positive growth mindset
  • Understand how to keep myself and others safe
  • Understand right and responsibilities
  • Working with other people to make the world a better place
  • Understand the importance of having a moral code
  • Contribute positively to my communities
  • Awe and wonder experiences broaden cultural horizons
  • Exploring opportunities inside and outside the classroom
  • Providing opportunities for wider school engagement
  • Contributing to and involving the local community

Core Values

  • K

    Kindness

  • C

    Co-Operation

  • A

    Ambition

  • S

    Sportsmanship

  • P

    Perseverance

  • P

    Pride

  • H

    Honesty

  • C

    Courage

  • R

    Responsibility

  • R

    Respect