Curriculum

Curriculum statement

Intent

We aim for our pupils to develop as independent, resilient and successful learners with high aspirations for what they can achieve. Our inclusive school supports pupils to develop as respectful individuals who know how to make a positive contribution to their community and the wider society.

We aim to deliver an aspirational and relevant curriculum, based on the national curriculum, capturing children’s interest and curiosity, fostering a real love of learning. Our curriculum is carefully mapped to ensure that it is coherently sequenced, progressive and accessible for all pupils, whatever their starting points. Learning sequences across year groups have been designed to support children to know and remember more. We achieve this through building on prior knowledge and supporting pupils to make connections in their learning.

We strive to ensure that pupils are well prepared, not only for the next phase of their education, but to be successful citizens of the future. We emphasise the holistic development of our pupils and motivate them to believe in themselves and inspire them to achieve their potential. We strive to promote a culture of high expectations and encourage pupils to have high aspirations for themselves. We celebrate pupils’ achievements and support children to recognise those positive feelings of pride and accomplishment.

Our curriculum is underpinned by the University of Brighton Academies Trust's core values of working together, achieving ambitions, delivering excellence and nurturing potential. Our ambitious programmes of study for each discipline are overseen by subject leaders and supported by carefully curated schemes of work to develop keys skills in the subject.

Implementation

Children begin their educational journey with us in our Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) department where their curriculum covers the seven areas of development as outlined in the EYFS statutory framework:

Personal, social and emotional development
Physical development
Communication and language
Literacy
Mathematics
Understanding the World
Expressive arts and design

Children at this stage in their development experience frequent adult-led inputs balanced with protected extended periods of child-led learning in our spacious environment which includes a large, open, natural outdoor space.

Priorities for adult led learning across the EYFS curriculum have been determined to ensure strong progression of knowledge across the academy. These are detailed on subject specific plans. The acquisition of early language and literacy skills drive this, with language concepts and vocabulary taught intensely using Concept Cat, Word Aware and Talk for Writing approaches.

Curriculum maps for each subject, outline the knowledge for each unit of work in each year group and how this fits into children’s learning journey within the subject. The sequence of teaching is carefully mapped to support the acquisition of knowledge. Teachers personalise the unit plan to meet the needs of the children in their cohort, unpicking vocabulary that is essential for the learning and creating carefully considered resources to support core knowledge. We aim to provide a range of opportunities to broaden pupils’ horizons and promote first-hand experiences to make learning relevant and utilise real-life learning opportunities including using our vast outdoor environment to enhance and enrich our curriculum.

We have high expectations that pupils think deeply. Teachers use a range of strategies to direct pupils’ attention and ensure all pupils are included in talking, thinking, remembering and contributing. Teachers monitor and respond to the learning in lessons, closely monitoring who has learned the taught curriculum and who has not.

Impact

We want children to leave us well prepared to thrive as they continue their educational journey and as citizens of their local community.

We strive for children to leave us with a real love of learning and the skills to be successful on their academic journey; learners who can work with independence and focused attention; learners who approach challenges with a solution-focused mindset and the skills to overcome any difficulties; learners who don’t give up, are highly motivated to succeed and achieve and are equipped with all the personal skills to do this.

We aim for our children to leave us as empowered, articulate, confident and respectful individuals with a clear understanding of complex values like equality, friendship and trust. We want our children to be able to make decisions for the right reasons, to be able to keep themselves safe and to be considerate of others and their community.

Computing

We have high expectations for all our pupils and strive that all become logical and computational thinkers, who are digitally literate and can use and apply information technology to communicate their ideas. We recognise that technology is an integral part of everyday life and strive to equip our pupils to meet the challenges of an ever-evolving digital world.

We offer our pupils a comprehensive computing curriculum in order to prepare them for life in the digital 21st century and a connected world. All pupils need to learn how to use and process digital information and to keep themselves digitally safe. Our pupils’ safety is paramount and we therefore spend considerable time focusing on digital safety.

Progression in Computing Knowledge

Learning to Learn

We are passionately committed to empowering our pupils to have the skills of self-efficacy, self-advocacy and emotional regulation. We create a nurturing environment underpinned by strong relationships where children feel safe, happy and able to learn. We are proud of our Building Brains curriculum in which all children experience explicit teaching about the development of the brain, emotional needs, executive function skills, as well as tools to manage their stressors. We strive for our pupils to develop as emotionally literate individuals who have an intrinsic motivation to learn.

Maths

We have high expectations for all of our pupils and believe that all can achieve highly and become confident and skilled mathematicians. We strive for all pupils to be curious and to understand the importance of mathematics in their everyday lives. Since the introduction of the new mathematics curriculum, we have adopted a Mastery Approach to maths.

In line with the aims of the national curriculum for mathematics, we aim to ensure that our pupils gain:

Deep and sustainable learning in mathematics which they are able to apply to a range of contexts
An ability to build on prior knowledge
An ability to reason about a concept and make connections
Sound procedural and conceptual understanding
Fluency with number and the ability to apply this to a range of contexts
An ability to solve complex problems by breaking them down into smaller steps and showing resilience

Reception Curriculum Map

Year 1 Curriculum Map

Year 2 Curriculum Map

Year 3 Curriculum Map

Year 4 Curriculum Map

Year 5 Curriculum Map

Year 6 Curriculum Map

Phonics

We place an strong emphasis on the teaching of reading, to ensure all pupils are able to read fluently and accurately. We believe that all pupils should leave primary school as fluent readers, who have a love of reading, and are able to comprehend a range of texts – we believe that this increases the accessibility of the wider curriculum for pupils.

Phonics is taught systematically and discretely as our initial approach for the teaching of early reading so that children have the skills they need to decipher new words and read fluently and confidently by the end of ks1. Alongside phonics, pupils engage in a broad and rich language and literacy curriculum to build vocabulary, narrative and storytelling skills to enable pupils to be able to read with understanding and enjoyment as they progress through ks1.

At The Baird Academy, there are three key skills that we teach to all pupils, these are:

1. Blending: the ability to push sounds together to build words.

2. Segmenting: the ability to pull apart the individual sounds in words.

3. Phoneme manipulation: the ability to insert sounds into and delete sounds out of words. This skill is necessary to test out alternatives for spellings that represent more than one sound.

Sounds Write Sounds-Write™ is a quality, first phonics programme. Its aim is to provide class teachers and support staff with a comprehensive system with which to teach reading, spelling and writing.

Our children in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 follow the Sounds Write programme. Some children in ks2 are also exposed to the programme through small group interventions.

Sounds-Write™ has been acknowledged by the Department for Education as a highly effective phonics programme.

Common Spelling of the Consonants

Leaflet for Parents

For our full phonics policy, please visit our policies page

Policies

Reading

We believe that reading and vocabulary unlocks limitless learning for pupils and the teaching of this is prioritised in our curriculum. We ensure that the vocabulary needed to understand and talk about learning is unpicked, with important vocabulary taught to be remembered. We ensure that early reading skills are systematically developed through high-quality phonics to support pupils to develop the decoding skills they need to read with increasing fluency. Throughout the Academy pupils experience opportunities to develop their comprehension through reading quality texts carefully chosen for each year group.

Science

We aim to provide an aspirational science curriculum that teaches our learners substantive knowledge through the disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics. Each learning stage builds on prior learning and prepares our pupils for the next stage. At every stage of their journey towards becoming scientists, our children learn key scientific skills, such as asking questions, building and testing hypotheses and conducting their own investigations.

In our classrooms, we learn through scientific enquiry. Scientific vocabulary and the principles of scientific thought are woven into the very fabric of our school life, and recording of progress is carefully conducted in line with our progression policies.

Our science curriculum prepares children for continuing to learn science in the next phase of their education. We strive for them to have a sound knowledge of the aspirational science curriculum to prepare them for opportunities to pursue science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) careers. We aim for children to develop the disciplinary and procedural knowledge to learn through scientific enquiry, being able to question, make hypotheses observe, predict, classify, group & pattern seek, carry out comparative and fair tests, take account of risks & hazards, know how to record and use data analysis, use evidence to develop explanations, conclusions and generalisations.

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