At Brookburn, our curriculum is designed so that children build knowledge, linking this to prior learning. The more children know the more they can connect and think about. Our curriculum design is based on our particular context and the needs of our children with teaching that promotes learning and opportunities and experiences for success in life. Our curriculum is based on the best care, guidance and support for children involving their families. Our curriculum is enriched for enjoyment, promotes healthy lifestyles, promotes a positive contribution and economic well-being, promotes staying safe and provides a social, moral and cultural contribution.
Please refer to the whole school curriculum year group overview:
Aims of our Curriculum:
Academic Excellence, ensuring that any child, no matter what their background or individual needs are, is as successful as they can be.
Empowering learning skills, we develop personal and social behaviours to support children through their primary years and to support effective life-long skills so they are self managers, resourceful thinkers, independent enquirers, team workers, reflective learners and effective participators.
Respect, this aligns with our Rights Respecting curriculum and underpins everything we do.
Physical well-being, a curriculum and mindset to support children’s health, well-being and sets lifetime habits.
Global citizenship, teaching our children about the world and their important place within it. Developing children’s awareness of their role and the positive impact they can have.
Mental Well-being and mindset, developing happy, secure and confident children who work with resilience and determination.
Creativity and the arts, to encourage creativity and personal expression and expose children to a variety of culturally diverse art forms to increase self-awareness, enjoyment, imagination and understanding.
Our Curriculum Breadth:
We follow England’s national curriculum
Core Subjects
English, Mathematics and Science
Foundation Subjects
Art and Design, Computing, Design and Technology, French, Geography, History, Music, PE.
Link to the national curriculum:
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum
We also have a PSHCE (Personal, Social, Health, Citizenship and Economic) curriculum which covers age appropriate RSE (relationship and sex education and A RE (Religious Education) curriculum which follows the agreed Manchester syllabus. Our school is a rights respecting school.
Curriculum Design at Brookburn
At Brookburn, children have inquisitive minds. Our job as educators is to act on this engagement, offering rich and meaningful opportunities to broaden our pupils’ minds, extend their knowledge of the world and their place within it and support their interest in a life-long quest for learning.
Our curriculum has a strong focus on language with planned opportunities for talk across our EYFS to ensure that on entry to KS1, children have strong foundations for discussion. Our curriculum across the school is rich in vocabulary and exposure to new language is encouraged by ensuring we use high quality texts to support delivery. Reading is a strength in our school and we believe in promoting a love of books within our curriculum offer as we see this as an essential skill that all pupils should master.
Our curriculum is coherently sequenced in each year group and in each subject so that children can recall detailed content and make links between subjects. We use research in cognitive science and making learning stick, to make what is taught more meaningful and long lasting for our pupils.
Our curriculum is designed to flow from lesson to lesson as a journey. Content is taught so that what has come before is used and revisited with children to help them develop further schemata and strengthen links in their knowledge and skill base. The idea behind this teaching principle is that pupils are being supported to develop from novices to experts.
Concepts are the way in which we give meaning to our curriculum breadth. We will use concepts to build a strong understanding. They are the building blocks of our learning.
We have subject specific concepts and Thinking concepts, which enable us to connect our knowledge together.
Our Thinking Concepts are: