Curriculum Overview
Let Your Light Shine Through Family, Friendship and Faith
National Curriculum
We deliver the National Curriculum by having an emphasis on cross-curricular teaching, where purposeful and relevant, with a strong focus on sequential and progressive skills. We believe that this is important for making the curriculum relevant and meaningful to pupils and for putting knowledge into context.
We believe that it is our responsibility to develop the Numeracy and English skills for all of our pupils. Using the Early Years Foundation Stage Strategy and National Curriculum as a basis, age-appropriate progression and knowledge for each core and foundation subject has been identified. This has been mapped out to ensure coverage of identified knowledge is secured across KS1 and KS2. We carefully select the sequence of when, what and how knowledge is taught and subject leaders work actively to review this regularly.
English and Numeracy skills are taught daily in subject based lessons, but also in other areas of the curriculum to ensure there is a transfer of these skills.
Science, computing and RE are taught as the other core subjects and, along with foundation subjects, are taught through topic.
Topics are either termly or half termly and may be on a two year rolling programme, or just a yearly programme.
The National Curriculum clearly states the expectations for each year group and details can
be found within this curriculum section of the website.
Personal ,Spiritual, Moral, Social and Cultural Curriculum
This is taught during worships, through PSHE lessons and is included in many parts of
everyday lessons and learning
Through this curriculum we provide opportunities help the children to develop
respectful relationships based on friendship, compassion, kindness, honesty and
forgiveness, so that everyone lives well together. It encourages the celebration of diversity,
recognises individual needs and provides fair opportunities for all. RE and Worship is
therefore central to the life of the school, and we encourage the spiritual development of all
children.
Enrichment/ Outdoor Curriculum
We have worked incredibly hard with our school grounds to enable us to provide excellent
outdoor learning opportunities for our children. This allows us to enrich the curriculum
and make learning exciting and inspiring.
We run our own version of Forest Schools and make full use of the National Trust Downs
Banks which is located close to our school, as well as accessing local areas in the village.
We hold regular themed/ enrichment days sometimes based on a subject or a particular
day eg May Day. Sometimes the children work within their lass and at other times year
groups will be mixed. The children and staff adore these days and it enables us to really
work as a school family as the children are taught by different teachers throughout the day.
Each year group will have at least one school trip per year, that is linked to their topic.
Year 4 have a 3-day residential in the summer term to Standon Bowers Outdoor Education
Centre.
Every year the whole school visits The New Vic Theatre to see their theatre production,
which is a special day for all!
Curriculum enrichment also involves visitors coming into school. This may happen on an
enrichment day. For example, a visiting willow weaver worked with all the children
throughout the day. As part of our Africa focus, an African drummer worked with all the
children throughout the day. Being a small school enables more children to be involved
when a visitor like this comes to school.
We are linked to schools in Kibera, a slum in Kenya, so through video and photos, our
children have been able to see poverty at its worst, and where involved in packing food for
the children and other fundraising events.
We run a range of after school clubs including football, Christian Club, cookery,
computing, ball skills to name but a few.
One of our enrichment strengths lies in our drama/ performances at Christmas and the end
of the school year. These experiences allow our children’s confidence to blossom.
A combination of all these areas provide the children with an enriched and exciting
learning experience whilst at Barlaston First. This means our children leave our school as
confident, enthusiastic and social young people, ready to start the next stage of their
education, having had very good groundwork put in place, upon which to build.