“Working together, learning together”…
...encompasses our commitment to developing every child through our partnerships with all stakeholders in their education.
BE POSITIVE BE PROACTIVE BE PROUD
The school is committed to ensuring a broad and balanced curriculum across all year groups. The development of the curriculum is now organised under three curriculum focus groups; STEAM (Science, Computing, Design Technology, Art and Mathematics), Languages & Humanities (English, History, Geography, Music and MLF (French)) and Health & Well-being (Physical Education, Religious Education and PSHCE/Character Education). Each group is facilitated by senior leaders and senior teachers who ensure that opportunities for links across each of the three groups are made purposefully. Overviews of our curriculum can be viewed using the links below.
Mission & Vision Statement
At Heap Bridge Village Primary School, we aspire to ensure that each and every one of our pupils develops in to a positive, proactive learner who is proud of their achievements and well prepared for a successful life. Delivered through a vibrant curriculum, we believe that learning should be enjoyable, purposeful and challenging. We will equip pupils with the skills and dispositions they need for lifelong learning, teach them the importance of being proactive, taking ownership of their own futures and ensuring they develop the highest expectations for themselves in their pursuit of excellence. We will do this within a safe and supportive environment of mutual understanding, positive relationships, respect and tolerance. Regardless of any barriers to learning, we will ensure that we work in partnership with school stakeholders to ensure that every child in our school can be proud of what they achieve.
Core Values & Aims:
BE POSITIVE
To enable children to develop positive attitudes in life, developing independence and resilience.
To respect individual differences, and to be sympathetic to the needs of others.
To create a happy, safe and nurturing environment instilling the fundamental values of respect and tolerance.
BE PROACTIVE
To ensure children develop intellectually, morally, socially, emotionally and physically in to well-rounded citizens and ready for the next stage of their life.
To feel empowered in taking ownership of own continuous learning.
BE PROUD
To ensure everyone values their own achievements and feel a sense of pride in their continuous pursuit of excellence.
To work in partnership with parents and other stakeholders in celebrating the strengths of the school (and school community) providing opportunities for children to fully develop their potential.
Working in Partnership
Our partnership work with other schools and external bodies provides many opportunities across the curriculum to give a purposed and enhanced opportunity for pupils to engage and excel across different subjects. Over the past two years we have;
- taken the lead in working with a local artist to produce gallery standard paintings linked to a local history project arranged across our collaborative group of schools,
- led a digital leader network – promoting leadership attributes within our pupils and promoting blogging, digital literacy and safer internet practice throughout the school,
- worked collaboratively across school to raise the profile of our school council, working with other school councils to tackle and raise awareness of local issues i.e. charity & fund raising, pupil well-being, mental health, safer driving, e-safety, dog fouling of public footpaths etc.
- supported local groups such as the ‘Heywood Monkey Trail (art project), Darnhill Festival and Heywood Business Group events.
Alongside these wider projects pupils enjoy a good range of other curriculum enhancements such as visits linked with their curricular studies, visitors in to school and preparing of class assemblies, productions and parent workshop days.
Tackling social disadvantage
At Heap Bridge we are committed to reducing any gaps in attainment seen within any particular groups of pupils. At the heart of our school is an unrelenting focus on ensuring pupils acquire the basic skills needed to succeed across the whole curriculum. The cornerstone to learning within any curriculum is the ability to read and understand texts across the range of academic subjects taught. As such, throughout the whole school, our focus on ensuring all pupils enjoy reading and can read confidently is our highest priority. We do this through a structured and systematic approach to the teaching of phonics, reading and comprehension from the first day in Reception to the end of Year 6.
More recently, we have looked closely at the latest research in to vocabulary acquisition and how explicit teaching of targeted vocabulary can raise levels of attainment (particularly for disadvantaged pupils) and enhance pupils understanding and application of knowledge across the curriculum. This will be a key aspect of our current work in revising our curriculum design within individual subjects.
Equally, our focus on ensuring each pupil receives a high quality of teaching, regardless of age phase, ability, social advantage or any other defining characteristic is exemplified through our whole school improvement planning, appraisal of staff performance and collaborative approach to developing professional practice across the school.
Planning for coverage, structure and content across the curriculum:
Each subject is driven by its own subject specific policy and progression framework. This is to ensure that the nuances of each subject discipline are captured and promoted through predominantly discrete teaching of subject content across the school.
To reduce the workload involved in high quality subject design, the school uses both published schemes of work and ‘school designed’ schemes to deliver individual subject content.
Monitoring
Our curriculum is driven by the work of three core curriculum teams. The STEAM, Languages & Humanities and Health & Well-being teams meet regularly each term to focus on curriculum design, implementation, monitoring of impact and review of school provision. The workflow for each of these teams is set out in our Curriculum Leaders Handbook and an overview of the remit for each team is noted below.
Each of the teams is led and facilitated by a member of the senior leadership team and each team also contains a balance of experience from within the staff team.
Within each subject area, the school will promote both the subject specific vocabulary and academic vocabulary associated with the content and concepts covered. Other aspects of our curriculum design will focus on the coherent coverage and sequential acquisition of knowledge and the understanding and application of skills needed to both embed and deepen the knowledge and cultural capital our pupils need to succeed in the next phase of their education. Below is an excerpt from our Curriculum implementation plan for the Year 3 unit on plants, in science.
Our school is committed to using the latest research and advice from professional associations to inform the continuous development of both our curriculum design and teaching pedagogy. Our science curriculum has been influenced significantly by our membership with the Association for Science Education (ASE) and our history curriculum has equally been informed by membership to the Historical Association (HA) and recommended practice. In developing our teaching methodology and curriculum content and structure in this way, we feel we offer staff a high level of professional development, insight and autonomy, which further impacts on the quality of teaching within the implementation of our school curriculum.
Assessment, recording and reporting impact
As with any curriculum plan, its success is determined by the degree and depth to which pupils learn and acquire the knowledge, understanding and skills set out to be taught. The school is working towards a situation where assessment, recording and reporting of learning across all subjects is based around the following:
a) Key knowledge & skills identified within the ‘Long Term Curriculum Implementation Plan’ documents.
b) Teacher identification of the different outcomes they would expect, normally between one and three, for each of the key assessment tasks for their topics;
c) Teachers assessment of pupils work and record of outcomes of pupils against standards of emerging, expected and higher standard – this may link to the use of quizzing outcomes from within a unit.
d) Assessment information is further used to assist teachers to plan their work with the class and prepare their reports to parents;
e) Reports to parents contain effort grades within the subject and at what level the children are working at in relation to emerging, expected and higher standard
f) Our ‘curriculum teams’ will collate small portfolios of examples of students' work that illustrates pupils’ performance key assessment tasks.
Parity & Inclusion
A wide variety of strategies are used to ensure that teaching meets the needs of different groups of pupils, including students with SEND, the gifted and talented and pupils from different ethnic or gender groups. These include: differentiating lessons, developing core skills, effective lesson planning and management, the appropriate deployment of resources and careful assessment and monitoring. The senior leadership team alongside the curriculum teams to monitor the application of these strategies.