Our Creative Curriculum
We believe that the curriculum should engage children so they not only see a value and use for learning but come to appreciate that the concept of lifelong learning is a key component in a rich and fulfilling life.
At Stonegate where we undertake a 'Learning Journey' approach to the curriculum where a number of subjects are linked together under one topic to create the greatest levels of excitement and enrichment.
Our vision drives our thinking for which learning experiences and curriculum activities will allow every member of our school community to flourish.
Intent
The breadth of our curriculum is designed with four goals in mind:
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To give pupils appropriate experiences to develop as confident, responsible citizens (provide a rich ‘cultural capital’)
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To provide a coherent, structured, academic curriculum that leads to sustained mastery for all and a greater depth of understanding for those who are capable.
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To complete much of our learning outside of the classroom, as we believe that this provides children with real life, concrete examples of learning.
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Highlights the importance of living to the values described by Jesus and reinforces the benefits of community.
Our curriculum structure and arrangement
- The curriculum breadth for each year group ensures each teacher has clarity as to what to cover. As well as providing the key knowledge within subjects it also provides for pupils’ holistic growth.
- Threshold concepts are the key disciplinary aspects of each subject. They are chosen to build conceptual understanding within subjects and are repeated many times in each topic. We share these with pupils as “learning hooks” which underpin learning in each milestone. This enables pupils to reinforce and build upon prior learning, make connections and develop subject specific language. This provides the vertical accumulation of knowledge and skills. These concepts are fully planned each term with our school's curriculum consultant.
- Milestones define the standards for the threshold concepts.
- Depth: we expect pupils in year 1 of the milestone to develop a Basic (B) understanding of the concepts and an Advancing (A) or Deep (D) understanding in Year 2 of the milestone. Phase one (Years 1, 3 and 5) in a Milestone is the knowledge building phase that provides the fundamental foundations for later application. LEARNING AT THIS STAGE MUST NOT BE RUSHED and will involve a high degree of repetition so that knowledge enters pupils’ long-term memory. If all of the core knowledge is acquired quickly, teachers create extended knowledge. The repetition of threshold concepts enables vertical accumulation as pupils move through their school journey.
Implementation
Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; two main principles underpin it:
- Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
- Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
In addition to the two principles we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term and that sustained mastery takes time.
Some of our content is subject specific, but we link concepts whenever possible in a cross-curricular approach.
Impact
The impact of our curriculum is that by the end of each Milestone.
We measure the impact of our curriculum using conferncing and analyse tasks. This support the pupils and the teachers by monitoring and measuring pupils fluency in breadth of understanding (National Curriculum) and depth of understanding (Chris Quigley).
We track carefully to ensure pupils are on track to reach the expectations of our curriculum.