Weston Village Primary SchoolCurriculum
Curriculum Intent
At Weston, we deliver a broad, rich and rigorous curriculum that both meets the needs of Weston pupils and provides them with the necessary knowledge, skills and understanding to prepare them for the next stage of their lives and beyond.
Our ambitious curriculum provides a crucial balance between promoting academic success, life skills such as resilience and hard work as well as well-being and mental health. In this way, pupils are effectively prepared for life beyond primary school, whichever path they choose to take.
The curriculum, from Reception to Year 6, embraces global learning and celebrates diversity whilst also making use of our local area, which offers rich opportunities for learning. The progression of pupils’ knowledge and the sequencing of concepts to ensure that learning is
meaningful, sustained and prepares pupils’ for future learning, is central to the development of our curriculum.
At Weston, we currently have a PAN of 38 meaning we can admit up to 38 children per year group. From September 2022, this will reduce to a PAN of 30, with the children in that cohort remaining together as a single age class throughout their time at Weston. All of the Reception children are taught by two teachers and an HLTA across a large and engaging environment. In years 1 to 6, in order to achieve the optimum class size of around 30, we have some mixed-age classes. The children in each class are determined by their date of birth. A mixed age class will typically be comprised of the younger children of one year group and the older children of the year group below.
Our intent is to maintain our expertise in delivering an effective curriculum to mixed-age classes by ensuring that every teacher has a thorough understanding of the whole school curriculum. In this way, they are able to challenge and support the children at a level appropriate to their needs. Our carefully crafted curriculum is tailored and personalised to suit our mixed age classes and ensure that every child accesses a progressive and sequentially delivered learning experience across every subject.
Curriculum Implementation
At Weston, the integrity of each subject is maintained and they are taught as discrete subject areas, rather than linked thematically. In this way, the knowledge, skills and understanding that pertain to each subject are taught with clarity and in sequence, with appropriate opportunities for pupils to practise what they know in order to deepen their understanding.
Every subject has a subject leader who is allocated dedicated time in order to ensure that our ambitious planned curriculum is the one which is delivered and to further develop each subject. In this way, we promote a broad and equitable curriculum, where every subject is valued and holds a secure place in the timetable.
We exploit opportunities to enrich the curriculum with experiences and opportunities that deepen pupils’ learning, such as visits out of school, visitors to school, using our forest school area and expertise and making the best use of opportunities within our community such as the church, allotments and farming industry. Further to this, our curriculum is delivered in ways that create real purposes for learning. Examples include writing letters to companies regarding fair trade, performing in concerts for parents to showcase learned musical skills and curating a gallery of art work.
Underpinning our curriculum are our Secrets of Success. Throughout every day, interweaved into lessons, playtimes, assemblies and other adult/child interactions, we explicitly teach and reinforce the attitudes of successful people. Our Secrets of Success are: Try New Things, Work Hard, Concentrate, Push Yourself, Imagine, Improve, Understand Others and Don’t Give Up. These attitudes enable children to find success when engaging with our challenging and ambitious curriculum.
Curriculum Impact
At Weston, all pupils, regardless of their starting points or other potential barriers to learning, aspire to reach our high expectations in order to achieve their potential across our broad and rich curriculum. Not only do children make good progress in the core areas of reading, writing and maths, they find similar success in every other subject. Because our curriculum is delivered in an engaging, relevant and sequential way, children quickly develop a life-long love of learning and attitudes towards learning that ensure their success beyond primary school and in ways that transcend formal education. In this way our curriculum fulfils our vision: Success for all will be desirable, demanded and achievable and is epitomised by our school motto: Be the best you can be.
Monitoring Curriculum Impact
Pupils’ learning across the curriculum is assessed on a daily basis by teachers, who have expertise in using discussion, observations and pupils’ work to make decisions about their next steps. This is checked on a regular basis by subject leaders and the senior leadership team. At the end of each term, more formal assessment information is collected by the senior leadership team who consider the progress made by the children in order to inform the effectiveness of the curriculum. Pupils are expected to make good progress or better and this progress in shared with parents at the end of every term, including a written report at the end of every school year.
More information about each subject can be found here:
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