Curriculum Intent
At Methley Primary School, our mission is to provide a transformative cradle to career education that allows our children to enjoy lives of choice and opportunity.
Our school ethos is at the heart of all that we do: we want our children to be motivated to learn, to
persevere and to recognise their own successes in a variety of contexts (M+P=S). Furthermore, we want our pupils to be great communicators and enthusiastic collaborators but, above all else, to be respectful citizens of the world. Our curriculum is designed to ensure our children are proud of their own heritage and culture (British Values) but also has an intercultural and international perspective because we believe that we can achieve more by coming together rather than staying apart.
Our Methley Magic FIVE
Motivation
We believe that childhood should be a fun, investigative and enquiring time in our lives where there
are no limits to curiosity and there is a thirst for new experiences and knowledge. We deliver an enriched, inclusive curriculum filled with cultural experiences and opportunities
Our pupils are self-motivated. We encourage our pupils to be aspirational and have big dreams. We show them the possibilities through our aspirations weeks and encourage them to set themselves targets. Our curriculum explains the relevance of the knowledge, skills and understanding the children are developing and the opportunities available to them in later life.
So that our children are life-long learners, learning to learn is also a key part of our curriculum.
Perseverance
Our curriculum is designed to include challenges that encourage our pupils to persevere. They understand that to FAIL is a First Attempt in Learning. They will experience the pleasure of ‘desirable difficulty’.
Success
We want to give our pupils every opportunity to be successful and so we have developed a curriculum, based on the National Curriculum, which has clearly sequenced content and stages of progression. Our curriculum is designed to support sustained mastery in all areas and is responsive to what they need. Our approach allows children to create schema that they frequently return to and build on what they already know.
Respect
We purposefully plan opportunities for children to encounter cultures, faiths and ways of life that are dissimilar to their own, and we teach children to approach these with sensitivity. We foster a respect for all people in the community through courtesy, kindness and consideration for all people’s beliefs, feelings and property.
Communication
At the heart of our curriculum is vocabulary development and intrinsic to that- reading. Simply put: knowing more words makes you smarter! From entry to our nursery, opportunities to develop language and communication are optimised.
Collaboration
By creating a collaborative school, we can build a community of caring individuals who are all working toward one common goal. By deliberately planning opportunities for children to cooperate, we support them to improve social and interpersonal skills and help them to better understand the material at hand through discussion and a team learning effort.
Empowering Education
We are committed to ensuring that our curriculum offer is inclusive, comprehensive and cohesive, and that our curriculum design and teaching are grounded in evidence. Core and foundation subjects are carefully mapped (using the National Curriculum as the basis) so that all children end their primary years having mastered a range of concepts, procedures and skills that fuel a thirst for learning, prepare them for future study and develop an understanding of the world in which they live. By the age of 18, we want every one of our children to have the opportunity to attend university or a high quality alternative. Our curriculum design will contribute to realising this vision.
Underpinning each unit of work is a core body of knowledge that is systematically taught, revised and revisited at distance to ensure that learning is committed to long-term memory. This knowledge will build cumulatively over the eight years that children are with us and, most importantly, it will empower children: it will give them the feeling of ‘being knowledgeable’, develop new interests, allow them to mediate social and cultural references, build on their understanding of the world and provide valuable content for writing and reading across the curriculum.
Spiritual, moral, social and cultural education and modern British Values are embedded into the curriculum, with links being woven into all years to ensure these values are consistently revisited and consolidated.
Enriching Education
Learning starts with the Entry Point to ‘hook’ in children’s interest and get them thinking about what the learning that will follow. The Big Picture of learning is then explained so the connections in the learning can be clearly seen. The children then take part in a series of Research and Recording Activities. Our curriculum has many opportunities for children to master processes and undertake disciplinary pursuits that subject experts undertake regularly. As historians, for example, they will gain knowledge of the key events and the people and places that have shaped our world today. They will also use this knowledge to analyse sources or explain cause and effect. Reading is a key element, allowing the children to ‘Read to Learn’ and giving them access to subject specific vocabulary. Children engage in a wide variety of experiential and exploratory activities including visits out of school and visitors to school. This also includes working collaboratively. Children are encouraged to record their learning in a variety of ways including art work, maps, graphs, music, writing and drama.
Assessment is key to ensuring our children build knowledge. Every lesson begins with retrieval practice and effective use is made of on-going assessment to structure future learning and support to ensure every child succeeds and is ready for the next stage of their education.
Some units of work will conclude with an Exit Point. This helps children to draw on their prior learning, reminding them of all the connections between subjects that they have made, and creates time and opportunities to consolidate learning, and to reflect on this individually and as a group. The exit point is an excellent chance for us to engage with parents and carers, involving them in celebrating the learning that has been achieved.
Key Documents
