Curriculum Maps

Curriculum Vision

We are a school which has much to celebrate, not least our picturesque grounds within the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead, which provide extensive educational opportunities for our school community.

Our aim is for every child to be 'Caring, Sharing and Learning Together' and we value celebrating success in school life to enable our children to become life-long learners and responsible citizens in society. Our vision and values translate into a creative, child-centred curriculum, which is broad and balanced to meet the needs of all children at every stage in their learning. Our lessons are carefully designed to meet the needs of all learners as all children aspire to Go for Gold.

Our lessons are adapted, whist maintaining high expectations for all, so that all children have the opportunity to meet expectations. Through the lessons, we encourage all the children to take independence and ownership of their learning.

Our curriculum is ambitious to challenge the more-able learners through greater depth teaching. An ambitious curriculum which is also designed to give all learners, particularly the most disadvantaged or SEND children the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life.

Curriculum Intent

Basic Principles

1. Learning is a change to long-term memory.

2. Our aims are to ensure that our children experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic (logical) knowledge.

Curriculum drivers shape our curriculum breadth. They are derived from an exploration of the backgrounds of our children, our beliefs about high quality education and our values. They are used to ensure we give our children appropriate and ambitious curriculum opportunities.
Cultural capital gives our children the vital background knowledge required to be informed and thoughtful members of our community who understand and believe in British values.
Curriculum breadth is shaped by our curriculum drivers, cultural capital, subject themes and our ambition for children to study the best of what has been thought and said by many generations of academics and scholars.
Our curriculum distinguishes between subject themes and ‘threshold concepts’. Subject themes are the specific aspects of subjects that are studied.
Threshold concepts tie together the subject themes into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of themes. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, students return to the same concepts over and over and gradually build understanding of them.
For each of the threshold concepts two Milestones (Milestone 1: key stage 1, Milestone 2: key stage 2), each of which includes the procedural and semantic knowledge children need to understand the threshold concepts, provides a progression model.
Knowledge categories in each subject give children a way of expressing their understanding of the threshold concepts.
Teacher’s plan using knowledge webs to help children to relate each theme to previously studied themes and to form strong, meaningful schema.
Within each Milestone, children gradually progress in their procedural fluency and semantic strength through three cognitive domains: basic, advancing and deep. The goal for children is to display sustained mastery at the ‘advancing’ stage of understanding by the end of each milestone and for the most-able to have a greater depth of understanding at the ‘deep’ stage. The time-scale for sustained mastery or greater depth is therefore two years of study.
As part of our progression model we use a different pedagogical style in each of the cognitive domains of basic, advancing and deep. This is based on the research of Kirschner and Rosenshine who argue to direct instruction in the early stages of learning and discovery-based Curriculum approaches later. We use direct instruction in the basic domain and problem-based discovery in the deep domain. This is called the reversal effect.

Implementation

Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science;

Three main principles underpin it:

1. Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.

2. Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate across terms and aids long-term retention.

3. Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.

In addition to the three principles we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term and that sustained mastery takes time.

Our content is subject specific. We make intra-curricular links to strengthen schema.

Continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, replaces the teaching of some aspects of the curriculum and, in other cases, provides retrieval practice for previously learned content.

Impact

Because learning is a change to long-term memory it is impossible to see impact in the short term.
We use comparative judgement (teacher assessment) in two ways: in the tasks we set and in comparing a child’s work over time.
We use summative assessments through English to determine reading and spelling ages in the medium term. In mathematics we use end of block assessments through White Rose at end of each theme and further termly assessments in arithmetic and problem solving/reasoning.
Foundation curriculum subjects are assessed through cold and hot tasks. At the beginning of a new theme the teacher assesses what the child already knows (cold task). Teaching is adapted to their current knowledge and extended. At the end of the unit of work the children are assessed again (hot task) to assess the progress they have made in a subject.
In some foundation curriculum subjects, floor books show the progression of a unit of work. PE, PSHE, music and computing evidence work using floor books.
We use lesson observations/learning walks to see if the pedagogical style matches our depth expectations. Walkthrus by Tom Sherrington develop instructional coaching and support for teaching methods in the classroom.