Our Curriculum Design
At Ringway our school curriculum is built around the total experience of the child. We provide a curriculum that ensures all children gain essential knowledge (the National Curriculum), whilst also giving them a multitude of opportunities to flourish intellectually, physically and personally building skills that they need for a successful future’.
We have a balance between what we must teach and what we like to teach to meet the needs of our children in our local community whilst bringing our school aims, vision and values to life.
We are committed to providing an outstanding, personalised curriculum which is centred around ‘Developing the Individual’ by placing equal importance on academic development and personal development including children’s wellbeing. We are determined to develop children’s cultural capital by fostering the values of respect, equality, self-belief, perseverance, excellence, creativity and team work./ collaboration.
Curriculum Priorities
Through careful discussion and analysis of our pupils’ backgrounds, cultures and learning behaviours as a school we have prioritised the following areas which drive our curriculum design:
- Behaviour of effective learners- our children need strategies to enable them to be more active, independent learners. They need to develop resilience, confidence and self-belief and the ability to independently transfer and interchange knowledge and skills that they need for a successful future. We know that our children need immersion in rich, engaging topics to enable practice, repetition and reinforcement of skills and knowledge to be fluent in many different concepts.
- Aspirations – our children do not lack the determination to succeed however they do not have an appreciation of the range of opportunities and possibilities available to them during the next stages of their lives.
Our aim is to deliver a carefully designed, planned and organised curriculum that challenges, engages and inspires children to have the resilience, confidence and self-belief to become independent and this is a key driving force.
Breadth:
We have designed and planned our curriculum to offer a range of learning experiences which contribute to every child receiving a full and rich curriculum. The range of experiences we offer ensures that our children benefit from a full range of academic, spiritual, moral, social and cultural activities. These activities enrich their lives and those of our whole school community and make them proud of their British values and the diverse society to which they belong and play an active part. We are proud that our curriculum gives our children the skills, confidence and self-belief to lead a happy and fulfilled life by encouraging them to aim high and work towards their goals and aspirations in life.
Balance:
We believe every child should feel valued, experiencing success in a wide range of curriculum areas. Through the curriculum we can impact positively on how they feel about themselves striving to ensure that they feel successful, confident and able to tackle any challenge that they may face.
We have designed, organised and planned our curriculum to ensure that every child receives an appropriate mix of academic and personal development which means that in practice our curriculum places equal importance on core and foundation subjects.
We place high priority on ensuring children’s physical and mental wellbeing is met ensuring that they take part in a range of sporting and physical activities and develop an understanding of how their brain and bodies function. We understand that children will not be successful learners unless they feel safe, are emotionally secure and happy in school; so therefore, we carefully design our curriculum ensuring children’s physical and mental wellbeing are as valued and important as their academic development.
This balanced approach is not to the detriment of our high standards in core or non-core subject areas. High standards of teaching and learning enable children to reach national expectations or above and is of vital importance if they are to succeed during the next stage of their education, going on to achieve full, happy lives and careers.
Creativity is encouraged, nurtured and developed across our full range of subjects. We are determined that each child is able to explore a full range of experiences both within the curriculum and outside of the curriculum in our extra-curricular clubs to enrich our curriculum. We have a plethora of clubs which make our extra-curricular offer busy and varied. These include book club, cookery club, times tables club, dance, multi-sports, miniband, art club, Coding club, forest school, construction club, board games, traditional card games, football, Spanish and our family learning programme to name just a few.
We are very fortunate to have vast grounds so that outdoor learning is commonplace and forest schooling is woven within the curriculum as well as being part of our extra-curricular offer.
Depth:
We design, organise and plan our curriculum to ensure that children are not merely covering content but developing a depth to their learning which enables them to use their skills and understanding in all across the curriculum.
Our curriculum design and planning means that we build in many opportunities for repetition and practise opportunities for essential knowledge, skills and understanding in every subject. This ensures that children are able to revisit previous learning, which allows them to gradually develop a depth of understanding of the skills and processes within subjects.
Our curriculum is meticulously planned to move the nature of children’s thinking to a higher order, deeper level of understanding rather than just acquiring new facts and knowledge with little context.
The curriculum is ever-developing and subject to regular review. We are proud that our curriculum is produced through high-quality collaborative working and all teaching staff are involved at every stage, taking ownership of the learning experiences that they deliver.
We provide a thematic curriculum which aims to fully immerse the children into engaging topics in which subjects are integrated where possible. Areas of learning are interlinked without losing their discrete nature, thus providing a wide range of connected learning activities. Teachers are careful to use the subject names when teaching to ensure that children understand that they are accessing a broad and balanced curriculum through a thematic approach. For each topic, teachers plan a variety of activities and experiences to motivate, engage and excite the children and educational visits are sought to enrich the learning that takes place in school. Teachers ensure that the National Curriculum is taught through topics and remain focused on the objective being taught, adding relevant activities and experiences that add value to the intended outcomes.