CURRICULUM INTENT
Our ambitious curriculum aims to enable all children to flourish in their academic and personal development. It promotes deep understanding of knowledge, skills and critical thinking, all underpinned by developing children’s oracy skills, from the moment they start school. Our curriculum is created with purpose and taught with passion, so that our children thrive as knowledgeable learners, who are confident communicators and active citizens.
The intent of Brecknock School is to provide all pupils with a rich, rigorous and horizon broadening curriculum. Brecknock is an inclusive school situated in a culturally diverse area, where we focus on the well-being and progress of every child and where all members of our community are of equal worth. We have high expectations of all learners and ensure that they achieve their best. Our curriculum is designed and delivered with a strong commitment to all children. With a focused pupil premium strategy, we ensure our disadvantaged pupils have the essential support, opportunity and access so they can develop academically. We adapt our curriculum carefully to ensure access for SEND pupils to gain the knowledge and skills they need. As a school we continue to learn, innovate and contribute to building an anti-racist community and implement a highly representative curriculum.
PHILOSOPHY
We provide a broad and balanced curriculum for all pupils, in line with the requirements of the National Curriculum. The breadth of the curriculum allows children to master knowledge and skills, in all subjects, both core and foundation.
The curriculum provides a clear progression model, supporting the layering of new knowledge and skills on secure foundations which are recapped. Subjects are taught discretely, so that both the knowledge and skills of the subject can be explicitly learnt. When appropriate, links are made between subjects to deepen children’s understanding. The curriculum for each subject is carefully planned, resourced and taught ensuring high levels of challenge and expectations for all learners.
In order to ensure our curriculum is current, relevant and inspiring, we enrich learning through varied resources, experiences and reciprocal partnerships with a range of educators, expert organisations, future employers and creative networks.
Our teachers are passionate, confident and informed about curriculum implementation and innovation.
The Brecknock curriculum is designed with the overarching question ‘Who Do I Want To Be?’ at its centre. We promote the following competencies in our curriculum design to ensure our children are:
Knowledgeable learners
We will achieve this by:
- Ensuring a well structured curriculum which follows the National Curriculum.
- Teaching a curriculum that is planned to incorporate learning for memory – long term learning.
- Teaching subject specific skills that enable children to draw on and deepen subject knowledge.
- Providing a relevant curriculum that sparks the curiosity of all children and engages them in knowing about people, places, ideas and their history and how all these have contributed to the way the world is now.
- Developing fluent readers who are able to access the breadth of the curriculum and benefit from rich reading capital.
- Developing accurate and engaging writers who have a sense of authorship and a love of words.
- Developing fluent mathematicians, who have strong number sense and confidence in problem solving and reasoning through a coherent curriculum.
- Educating children to live responsible, safe and healthy lives.
Confident communicators
We will achieve this by:
- Developing children’s proficiency in spoken language and vocabulary acquisition and application in every subject.
- Enabling children to engage in both exploratory talk (the talk we use to explore and develop our thinking) and presentational talk (the talk we use with an audience to explain, inform or persuade) across the curriculum.
- Knowing that oracy helps pupils develop and deepen their subject knowledge and critical thinking skills in all areas of the curriculum, which is fundamental to their attainment.
- Empowering our students to utilise language as a tool to communicate and access our crucial right to be heard.
Active Citizens
We will achieve this by:
- Teaching skills that develop informed, confident, agile thinkers, who are able to solve problems and respond to the world around them.
- Embedding the BRIGHT values throughout the curriculum, encompassing British Values and the UNCRC rights of the child.
- Providing relevance in the curriculum through the global Sustainable Development Goals, turning learning into actionable projects within the community, led by our children as local changemakers (inequality, health, sustainability).
- Delivering an extensive enrichment offer.
