St Bridget’s Curriculum Design Overview
Our school vision statement and values are central to the design of our curriculum with a development of our children as spiritual beings through connecting our curriculum with ‘Our World’, ‘Our Community’ and ‘Our Environment’. Children at St. Bridget’s experience the full breadth of the National Curriculum with progression mapped using DFE and research-informed schemes (such as Kapow, Maths No Problem and Teach Computing) and school plans developed with expert educational consultants. Learning opportunities are carefully designed to celebrate and further understand our school’s context and local area whilst helping children embrace the global nature of our mission statement to ‘love your neighbour as yourself.’
Our Pedagogical Approach
Children gradually progress in their procedural fluency, semantic strength and depth of understanding through their curriculum journey . Our aim is for all children regardless of their starting points to display sustained mastery in their learning though we recognise that the time frame for achieving mastery will vary for each individual child. Lessons are designed to ensure access for all learners through deliberate design and the use of ‘low floor, high ceiling’ tasks; intelligent practice; repetition and spaced retrieval and the avoidance of cognitive overload.
St Bridget’s Curriculum Statement
Basic Principles
- Learning is a change to long-term memory.
- Our aims are to ensure that our children experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge.
- Our curriculum is derived from an exploration of the backgrounds of our children, our beliefs about high quality education, our school values (underpinned by our Rights Respecting Schools work) and our school mission and vision statements. They are informed by our school SEF and school priorities. They are used to ensure we give our children appropriate and ambitious curriculum opportunities connecting to ‘Our World’, ‘Our Community’ and ‘Our Environment’.
- Cultural capital gives our children the vital background knowledge required to be informed and thoughtful members of our community who understand and believe in British values. For example:
Curriculum Intent model
- Opportunities are sought to enhance social awareness using our work with Rights Respecting Schools.
- Independent thought and problem-solving skills are encouraged through the inclusion of Chess.
- Leadership and responsibility through Eco and Ethos Ambassadors, Well-Being Ambassadors, Play Leaders, Prefects, Year 4 Link Café helpers, Archbishop of York Young Leaders Awards.
Curriculum breadth is shaped by the National Curriculum, cultural capital, subject topics and our ambition for children to study the best of what has been thought and said by many generations of academics and scholars from all over the world.
- Our core subjects carefully match the National Curriculum and provide children with the opportunity to develop a deep understanding through a spiral curriculum approach in which key concepts are revisited and knowledge is built up over time.
- Our foundation subjects’ curriculum (unless explicitly designed using Kapow or a DfE backed scheme) utilise a similar approach in that the National Curriculum is met through a spiral approach that develops a deep understanding of key concepts. The progression through which is broken down into small steps which build up knowledge over time. Schemes such as Kapow or Teach Computing follow a similar spiral structure with all key learning and knowledge clearly matching the National Curriculum.
- Knowledge webs help children to relate each topic to previously studied topics to form strong, meaningful schema.
- Cognitive science tells us that working memory is limited and that cognitive load is too high if children are rushed through content. This limits the acquisition of long-term memory. Cognitive science also tells us that in order for children to become creative thinkers, or have a greater depth of understanding they must first master the basics, which takes time.
- Throughout our curriculum, children gradually progress in their procedural fluency and semantic strength. The goal is for children to work towards mastery at the end of each topic.
- As part of our progression model we use a different pedagogical style in each of the cognitive domains of basic, advancing and deep. This is based on the research of Sweller, Kirschner and Rosenshine who argue to direct instruction in the early stages of learning and discovery-based approaches later.
- Also, as part of our progression model we use a range of formative and summative assessment.
Implementation
- Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it.
11.1.2. Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
11.1.3. Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.
- In addition to the three principles we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term and that sustained mastery takes time.
- Our content is subject specific. We make intra-curricular links to strengthen schema.
- In the early phases of school, continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, replaces the teaching of some aspects of the curriculum and, in other cases, provides retrieval practice for previously learned content.
Impact
- Because learning is a change to long-term memory it is impossible to see impact in the short term.
- We do, however use probabilistic assessment based on deliberate practise. This means that we look at the practices taking place to determine whether they are appropriate, related to our goals and likely to produce results in the long-run.
- We use comparative judgement in two ways: in the tasks we set and in comparing a child’s work over time.
- We use a variety of approaches, which include Teacher Research Groups, lesson study, lesson observations, learning walks and coaching, to see if the pedagogical style matches our learning expectations.
- We use summative assessments such as NTS and MNP Insights to show progress over time and also provide diagnostic value, highlighting areas that need further time for learning and focus.
