‘We Can and We Will!’
At Fairburn View Primary School we see it as our moral imperative for all children, regardless of background, to achieve their very best. Our aim is to provide an excellent education for all our students; an education which brings out the best in all of them and prepares them for success in life.
Our intention is to maximize the life chances for our children and to prepare them for the life changes ahead of them. We want to give them the knowledge and skills to become geographers, historians, mathematicians, scientists and the like.
Our curriculum is designed to provide children with the core knowledge they need for success in education and later life, to maximise their cognitive development, to develop the whole person and the talents of the individual and to allow all children to become active and self-sufficient citizens. It is also our ethos that we develop the social and emotional wellbeing of ‘all’ our children, with a resilient ‘we can, and we will’ attitude.
The curriculum at Fairburn View Primary School aims to prepare children in understanding the world around them and prepare them for the next stage of their education. We want our pupils to be well-rounded members of society with strong morals, emotional intelligence and integrity. The key drivers for our curriculum are:
Entitlement – Our curriculum has the breadth of the national curriculum as a basic entitlement for all pupils. However, it goes beyond this to ensure a depth of knowledge and understanding.
Vocabulary and Cultural Literacy – the curriculum has a core focus on vocabulary development within and across subjects. Our curriculum gives pupils access to a range of cultures with specific focus on their own heritage and local society and skill required to be a successful citizen.
Subject Content – The overall content of individual subjects is structured as a narrative over time, units building on previous learning. Individual lessons build into coherent units of work which in turn contribute to the overall content spiral. Content is revisited regularly in recall and retrieval practice activities that take place in most lessons.
Big Question – We are implementing a Big Question exploration of the curriculum. The curriculum incorporates the rigour of subject substantive knowledge. Therefore, it is based on individual subject learning in the main. Links across subjects are made where appropriate but the curriculum is planned so that it doesn’t sacrifice subject identity and progression for cross-curricular links. Teachers and pupils will be able to explore an age-appropriate answer to the big question through the units at every stage, and the answer becomes more detailed and developed at each successive stage. We are redesigning our teaching units to adapt to this style when appropriate, to allow the pupils to become more immersed in a theme and apply this knowledge with enthusiasm in Writing. We are also incorporating disciplinary knowledge into our curriculum, where the pupils will become a practitioner of the subject.