Baynards Primary School Curriculum
At Baynards Primary School, our curriculum is designed to provide opportunities for all children to develop as independent, confident, successful learners with high aspirations. We want all our children to ‘Be the best they can’ and make a positive contribution to the world they live in. We recognise a curriculum needs to be broad, balanced and offer pupils opportunities to grow as individuals as well as learners. Pupils are challenged and supported to learn from failures and celebrate successes.
We have prioritised the key skills and aspirations we want our children to experience and develop during their time with us. We use these 'drivers' to underpin the learning and experiences we undertake in all areas of school life and to ensure our curriculum offer is enriched. These key drivers are personal to our school and reflect the social and educational needs of our local area. Our four key drivers for our school curriculum are:
Curiosity Aspiration Resilience Enjoyment
- CURIOSITY: We want all children to be curious about the world around them and ask questions. We encourage the children to be inquisitive and ask questions throughout their learning and school life experiences. This approach to learning enables inquisitive thinking such as exploration and investigation and nurtures problems solvers.
- ASPIRATION: Aspiration is the ambition, hope or desire to strive to achieve something, to be the best they can possibly be and to challenge themselves as a learner. The development of aspirations encourages children to produce work of high quality, take pride in themselves and be the very best that they can be.
- RESILIENCE: Resilience means having the skills and resources to deal with challenges and barriers. Resilience is a measure of how much you want something and how much you are willing, and able, to overcome obstacles to get it. Children are supported to develop resilience and the ability to ‘have a go’, even when learning is tricky.
- ENJOYMENT: We want all children to enjoy learning and finding answers to the questions they have. Developing curiosity, aspiration and resilience will support children to enjoy learning, even when it is ‘tricky’. Enrichment and extra-curricular activities are designed to foster an enjoyment of learning, preparing children to be learners throughout their time in education and beyond.
We teach the National Curriculum and the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum, using a wide range of strategies, as we recognise that children learn in different ways. Whilst we strive to include all children in whole class learning, we understand that, for some children, alternative approaches may be required. For these children, an alternative curriculum will support the development of self-regulation and other skills and attitudes that will ultimately enable them to learn alongside their peers.
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-primary-curriculum
As a small school with mixed-age classes, we cover the curriculum requirement for each class over 2 years (cycle A and cycle B) ensuring all areas are covered by the time a child moves to the next class. We have invested in high-quality schemes of work to support our staff in ensuring there is clear progression and curriculum coverage. These include Kapow, Language Angels and White Rose Maths. These are used as a starting point for teaching and support teacher workload which is a key factor in a smaller setting.
It is important to us to supplement our curriculum with a broad range of exciting, relevant and creative experiences that enrich our children’s learning. This includes trips, visitors, forest school learning in our school grounds and links with our local community including St Luke’s Church and Thurstable School. We recognise the importance of exposing children to a variety of extra-curricular activities and our pupils will have many opportunities to enjoy a variety of creative and sporting clubs such as football, multi skills, fencing, street dance, singing, board games, art and computing.