Our Curriculum
Curriculum Intent, Implementation and Impact
Aims and Principles:
The overarching aim of the Harris Federation is to end the cycle of poverty and disadvantage: to improve the life chances for all students, their families and the community in which they live. We begin with the principle that all children are equal and there is, therefore, equality of entitlement to knowledge for each of our pupils.
At Harris Primary Academy Mayflower our curriculum aim is to develop learners who are knowledgeable, confident and enthusiastic and can make links with the world around them. Our Core Values of Community, Responsibility, Achievement, Perseverance and Manners run are interwoven throughout.
Whatever a child's background or starting point, the leadership team and staff at Mayflower are ambitious for all pupils and aim to ensure they finish Year 6 with the academic skills, social skills and knowledge in order to thrive. We recognise and value each child's individual personality and work to develop their self-confidence and self-esteem.
Our Curriculum Intent- What is our curriculum trying to achieve?
At Harris Primary Mayflower, our curriculum has 6 key intentions:
1) To equip pupils with rich knowledge across a range of subjects that they are able to use confidently. Pupils will build strong foundations of knowledge (schemata) through organising knowledge, making connections and anchoring the new knowledge.
Pupils will secure the ‘Big Ideas’ or the major understanding for each subject area.
2) To secure concepts in English and Maths in early phases as we believe that this acts as a gateway to acquiring core knowledge across a range of subjects.
3) To ensure children have the opportunity to immerse themselves in a range of texts, developing a ‘love of reading’ and becoming confident and fluent readers.
4) To ensure that pupils have an enriched and ambitious vocabulary and that through understanding meaning clearly, they are able to confidently use this vocabulary in their work.
5) To ensure that pupils embrace diversity and understand clearly our British Values through our Core Value of Community.
6) To maintain curiosity and creativity through providing a wide range of hands-on and practical experiences for pupils to ensure that they can make sense of their learning.
7) To ensure that pupils are well prepared for the transition from EYFS to KS1, KS1 to KS2 and KS2 to KS3.
Our Curriculum Implementation-
Our Curriculum has been developed to deliver our Core Values of Community, Responsibility, Achievement, Perseverance and Manners as we believe they are the essential key drivers to ensure all pupils achieve their full potential academically and emotionally.
In English, teaching is linked to a high quality text which are specifically chosen to inspire their writing. Vocabulary, spelling and grammar are taught discreetly. Each lesson, pupils learn the rich meanings of 4-5 new words through role-play and discussion.
To ensure the children are confident and assured mathematicians we use the maths mastery approach. This means pupils are constantly working to develop their understanding, skills and knowledge, rather than achieving certain criteria and subsequently moved on. Our mastery approach emphasises achievement and challenge for all. Children are supported to achieve their full potential and encouraged to link mathematical understanding to further develop their knowledge throughout lessons ensuring that they become fluent with these skills. An emphasis on depth of understanding is central to our curriculum.
As a Read, Write, Inc. Model School we teach 1 hour of phonics a day and pupils follow up their learning by taking home a book that matches the sound they have learned. Any pupil that needs extra support in Phonics receives a daily 1:1 tuition session. Once pupils have completed the phonics programme (off-scheme), they are taught reading comprehension skills as well as how to further analyse, research and evaluate using texts.
Subjects are taught discreetly over a period of one week so that pupils are able build on a sequence of knowledge within each subject. Each subject has a subject and unit overview where learning is broken down.
Learning is mapped from Year 1 to 6 and pupils build their knowledge of the big ideas, systematically and cumulatively. Knowledge Organisers are shared at the beginning of each unit and detail the specific knowledge that pupils will learn and the related vocabulary.
Within each lesson pupils learn the rich meanings of 4-5 new words through role-play and discussion.
Subjects such as P.E (including Dance), Mandarin and Music are taught by subject specialists with class teachers present during the lesson to continue to build specialist subject knowledge and to enable the teachers to support assessment of learning.
Our Curriculum Impact-
In our academy, we believe that our curriculum makes a profound and positive impact to the outcomes of every child. The structure of our curriculum enables us to return to the powerful knowledge and skills pupils should have mastered at regular intervals across the year and key stages.
At Harris Primary Academy Mayflower we track progress and achievement to ensure that children make rapid progress. We use a balance of formative and summative assessments to review progress and include gap analysis tasks to support planning and as part of our review of the curriculum. A large part of our monitoring of impact comes through pupil voice work and the ability of our pupils to talk about their learning.
Pupils who are vulnerable nationally to low achievement, such as pupils eligible for Pupil Premium finding and white British pupils, are monitored carefully to ensure that we continue to close any gaps.
