Curriculum

Our curriculum has been designed to ensure comprehensive coverage of the National Curriculum. In fact, due to our careful sequencing we are able to exceed these expectations in each of our subjects.  We use the National Curriculum as a starting point rather than a limit to what we cover in each subject. We have worked with our partner schools across the Federation, and our central team of subject experts, to build our own curriculum. We build on the work of external experts for our phonics, reading and mathematics teaching. All other subjects are taught using our in house plans and progression. Each subject is taught discretely and weekly to support children in remembering the key knowledge and skills they need to fulfil our intent.

Reading is at the heart of everything we do at Shortlands, as we recognise that excellent reading skills unlock the possibilities of the rest of the curriculum for our children. We have specialist teaching for PE and work with the British Council to deliver our Mandarin teaching, which starts in Reception rather than in Year 3- an example of how we are able to exceed the standard expectations of learning in a primary school. We are clear that the start of the curriculum journey for each subject begins in EYFS, so whilst still following the EYFS framework, the foundations of each subject are carefully sequenced in Reception.

We have a mastery mindset for every subject- meaning we have the same high expectations for every child- scaffolding and supporting the least able to enable them to meet each objective. For us, mastery means that children are able to articulate their learning, make links between knowledge they have learnt in different subjects and remember the key knowledge and skills required to be a master in each subject. At HPAS mastery also means deepening children's knowledge and understanding rather than accelerating them through the curriculum. For example, our most able mathematicians won't ever move on to the maths that is expected of the next year group, instead they will develop a deeper understanding of the current year groups objectives. This is a decision we have made as we approach our curriculum as a narrative model. The analogy we use is this- You can't understand Chapter 5 of a book if you haven't already read Chapters 1-4. As such, the deeper the understanding of Year 4 maths objectives we can give our children the better prepared they will be for the demands of the Year 5 maths objectives. We apply this model to every subject in the curriculum. 

We have developed a range of strategies that we use across all of our curriculum subjects that help us to ensure that children know more and remember more as they move through our curriculum.

We look forward to offering you the opportunity to talk to our children about their learning when you come to visit us on an open morning.

We use Ruth Miskin's Read Write Inc programme to deliver our phonic teaching. you can find more information about the scheme at https://www.ruthmiskin.com/en/find-out-more/parents/

SMSC and British values are thread throughout our curriculum so that they become an integral part of our curriculum planning and implementation.

Our intent documents share with you what we hope for all our children by the time they leave us, and the curriculum coverage outlines how we implement our intents. We will be very happy to share more detailed information about the sequence of knowledge, understanding and skills we intend our children to learn when you visit us in school. Our EYFS class follows a separate intent, that feeds in to our whole school intent.