Curriculum Information

This page contains information about the curriculum at All Saints’ CEVCP, including the very latest documents and curriculum plans. If you want to find out more about the curriculum then please contact Mrs Clare Lamb (Headteacher) or Mrs Suzanne Kemp (Senior Teacher).

All Saints’ Curriculum Essentials 

The essentials are English and Maths which hold a priority position in the school day. They aim at teaching the children the knowledge and understanding needed to access the other two elements of the curriculum but also to master the essential skills needed to be successful in the next stages of their education and on into adulthood.

As a school, reading has a particular ‘weighting’ within our English curriculum, as we believe reading to be the key skill used to access all learning and from which to derive pleasure. 

When we talk about the wider curriculum, we are thinking about subjects such as:

• Science     
• History           
• Geography               
• Art
• Design & Technology
• Music
• MFL (Modern Foreign Languages)   
• PSHE (Personal, Social, Health, Emotional)
• Religious Education (RE)
• Computing

How do we structure the wider curriculum at our school?

The National Curriculum:

We follow the National Curriculum to structure our curriculum offer, as we know that this means our curriculum is ambitious for all pupils. You can find a link to the National Curriculum here: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum

Structuring our curriculum offer:

We teach each of the wider curriculum subjects discretely at our school.

For each subject, we have thought carefully about how we sequence learning over time and have broken down learning into small steps, starting from when children enter primary school until they leave.  At each step, we consider what specific knowledge and understanding we want our pupils to know and remember at each stage of their learning and in each subject.

When we talk about how we have structured our curriculum offer, we call this curriculum intent. Curriculum intent includes the specific details of what we intend our pupils to learn at each stage in their school journey. What pupils know, remember, and can do indicates how well they can achieve (progress).

Gaining Knowledge

Our curriculum has been carefully designed so that pupils gain more knowledge over time. Some knowledge is very important, and we return to this regularly to help it ‘stick’ in children’s memory. For example, it is crucial that children automatically know the number facts that combine to make 10 (2+8, 3+7 etc). Knowing these number facts allows pupils to make links with many areas of number throughout their school life, so we revisit this learning regularly in the first few years of school to make sure this knowledge is ‘sticky’.

Knowledge is divided into two types:

Substantive Knowledge:  This refers to specific facts to be learned, such as, for example, the names of the countries in the United Kingdom (Geography), or in History key facts about an historic event such as World War 1.  Substantive knowledge refers to knowing ‘what’ specific facts need to be remembered.

Disciplinary Knowledge:  Whereas substantive knowledge is about ‘what’ facts, disciplinary knowledge is about knowing ‘how’. Sometimes people refer to disciplinary knowledge as skills.

In our curriculum plans, we have identified the specific substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge we want our children to know, remember, and use over time.

Knowledge and links with reading and vocabulary acquisition:

We believe that knowledge gained also plays an important part in pupils gaining reading comprehension, and therefore, as we know that reading is so important, we place great emphasis on ensuring knowledge of the wider curriculum is sticky. We know that when pupils read and engage in reading comprehension activities, reading comprehension is dependent on knowledge of the subject being read. What we know allows us to read and understand what we have read. Knowledge learned across the wider curriculum facilitates comprehension. It also helps our pupils gain a broader vocabulary. We know that children are exposed to a richer vocabulary base when they access a broad curriculum, and this is very important to their future success.

Starting the knowledge journey:

Our curriculum planning starts in Early Years. In Reception, we begin to lay the foundations of the wider curriculum through our Early Years curriculum offer. In People, Culture and Community/ The Natural World, for example, children learn about their immediate environment when they start to understand early map work (the foundations of the geography curriculum). On our curriculum pages and Early Years pages we have provided more examples and information about our curriculum intent for early years. We start this journey in early years for two main reasons:

1. Access to a rich curriculum broadens children’s exposure to a wealth of vocabulary, which we know to be of crucial importance in the early years.
2. Laying the foundations for the wider curriculum prepares children for transition to Year One.

Making sure knowledge is sticky:

When we have designed our curriculum, we have made sure the following applies to enable pupils to retain the important substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge:

• Prior knowledge is identified and built upon.

At each stage in the school journey, teachers make sure that they understand what prior learning has taken place and how well children have remembered it. They revisit prior learning, particularly at the start of a unit of work but also at other stages in the learning process, to make sure that they are building new learning on secure foundations.

• Making links with other learning. 

We know that knowledge ‘sticks’ when links are made between subjects. The more we introduce pupils to related content, the deeper knowledge will be. Key concepts in each subject are revisited over time.

• Making sure that the way we implement our curriculum plans places emphasis on the most recent research into how to optimise the science of memory.

We understand that learning is defined as an alteration in long-term memory. If nothing is altered in long-term memory, then nothing has been learned. Therefore, our teachers use teaching strategies informed by the most up-to-date research and recommendations from the EEF and Chartered College.

When we implement our curriculum plans, we deploy metacognitive strategies, knowing that knowledge is more likely to be remembered over time when we use strategies including retrieval practice, generative learning strategies, and making sure that we do not overload children’s working memory.