At Holme Slack Community Primary School, we have great ambition for our children and that is reflected in our curriculum. It is designed to give all pupils the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life.

Following a successful period of subject development in Mathematics as part of the Teaching for Mastery Development Programme, we aim to emulate this model and its principles across our school curriculum.

The key foci for this development include:

Improving expertise through professional development

The biggest single factor that impacts on the quality of pupil learning experiences across our curriculum is the quality of teaching. The quality of our teacher professional development is, therefore, of vital importance. At Holme Slack, we are continually striving to improve the learning experiences of staff as well as pupils. This improvement is facilitated through:

• intellectually challenging professional learning activities
• engagement with appropriate professional organisations
• reflection upon our own practice and engagement in research
• building meaningful subject and curriculum expertise
• contextualised and relevant staff training activities
• a focus on teams and teamwork across school staff to enable collaborative professional dialogue and to promote shared understanding
• the opportunity to model and observe lessons in a non-judgemental environment which is focused on professional and collaborative learning

Coherence

Our curriculum has been designed using key learning (identified by the Lancashire Professional Development Service) from each National Curriculum Programme of Study to ensure effective progression across the primary phase.

At Holme Slack, we think carefully about the steps along the learning journey (at each level, from overall school curriculum, through long and short term planning to individual lessons) in order that the children can make connections and therefore make sense of the learning explored.

In developing a coherent curriculum, we give consideration to the following:

• vocabulary is fundamental to developing understanding
• small steps are easier to take
• particular learning techniques, concepts, skills and bodies of knowledge are important pre-cursors to later learning experiences. The effective sequencing of these is an important skill in our planning and teaching
• when introducing new ideas, it is important to make connections with earlier ones that have already been understood
• when something has been deeply understood (or mastered), it can and should be used in the next steps of learning

A Broad, Balanced and Enriched Curriculum

Our curriculum starts from the premise that children should gain a breadth of experience in the full range of disciplines. Alongside school’s traditional academic priorities, children have the opportunity to engage in a wide range of relevant activities which support the development of their physical and mental well-being, creativity and, crucially, their ambition and aspiration.

We value the contribution that visitors from outside school can offer to our curriculum. Expert teachers, inspiring people from our community, subject specific visits and workshops and professional demonstrations all serve to bring our curriculum to life.

Learning outside the classroom is also viewed by school as a powerful, positive teaching tool that can enhance the social, personal and emotional development of all learners. We are developing a Forest School programme and participating in the Nature Friendly Schools project with the aim of fostering resilience, confidence, independence and creativity as well as fuelling a sense of adventure within all of our learners.

Fluency

At Holme Slack, we aim to ensure that pupils become fluent in the fundamentals of the curriculum we offer, so that pupils develop understanding and the ability to recall and apply knowledge efficiently, flexibly and accurately. This is facilitated through:

• vocabulary development
• engaging in interesting and exciting learning activities
• learning which involves active interaction with ideas, places, people and resources
• allowing children time to revisit previous learning and placing learning in context
• learning which involves rehearsal, revision and repetition

Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development

The development of confidence and self-esteem is at the core of our practice. In the delivery of our curriculum at Holme Slack, we actively encourage risk taking in order to enable pupils to explore and try new ideas without the fear of failure. The spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of our pupils is addressed in some of the following ways:

Spiritual

We aim for our pupils to become curious and reflective and to explore, question and, through their learning, to make connections to the world around them and the way it works.

Moral

In our school, we encourage respect and reward good behaviour choices. We value listening to others views and opinions and we promote discussion about knowledge and understanding and challenge assumptions, supporting students to question the information that they are presented with.

We show the students that we are on a quest for truth by rigorous and logical argument and discourage jumping to unfounded conclusions.

Social

We encourage collaborative learning in the classroom – in the form of listening and learning from each other and activities such as paired discussion / working partners.

We help pupils to develop their powers of logic, reasoning and explanation by offering explanations to each other.

We exhibit pupils work in classrooms - to share their good practice and celebrate achievement through creating informative displays

Cultural

Diversity of cultures, faiths and beliefs forms the fabric of our school community. Children at Holme Slack are actively encouraged to understand, accept, respect and celebrate such diversity.