A GOLD standard Curriculum for all at SGPS

Advance warning!

Our curriculum is always adapting to the needs of our children and community but uses the National Curriculum as its base. You may notice small changes in the delivery of the curriculum in comparison to what is displayed here and we will endeavor to have the most up to date version of our curriculum on these pages. In 2023 we relooked at our Curriculum offer to improve it. New documents are being added and will be labelled if they're the new 2023 version!

Our curriculum is designed to impact on our pupil's knowledge, skills and experiences over weeks, months and years as well as hoping for a long-lasting legacy of a love of learning. 

We encourage you to visit our individual subject pages to find out more about how the subjects are taught in our school. At Seacroft Grange we have 'The Book' - A guide to GOLD which is designed to codify our pedagogical practice when it comes to our approach to each subject. An edited version is available here

Our Maths and English curriculum are more adaptive to the every day needs of our children however there are some key curriculum documents that support our planning and classroom delivery. They have their own curriculum pages which can be found in the Curriculum tab.

SGPS' Curriculum - by year group

SGPS' Curriculum - by subject: medium term plans & retrieval support

The documents below are the schemes of work for the subjects and the retrieval documentation that supports teachers to ensure that children 'know more and remember more' by revisiting previous work during each session through a Do Now activity. Research supporting the Do Now approach can be found here

Introduction

At Seacroft Grange Primary school we want the best for and the best from everyone in our learning community. This is often articulated as a contract in 3 main ways:

1. We want our children to have access to the best education and therefore we expect children to work hard and behave well
2. We will enable our staff to be the best that they can be through challenge, support and CPD and expect them to work hard for our children and for themselves
3. We want our parents/carers to feel supported and know that their child is receiving the best possible education. In return we expect our parents/carers to support school in supporting their children.

This contract is absolutely true when it comes to our curriculum offer. We will ensure access to a high quality of education across our curriculum and expect children, staff and families to engage in this for the benefit of our children. Children are reliant, in many respects, on schooling for their education and ability to take part in a social society. Our curriculum is designed to give children knowledge, skills and experiences which allow them to have social mobility. We believe this is our social duty to provide access and opportunity through our curriculum.

Everything we do at Seacroft Grange is about ‘Investing in GOLD standard’. The time we give, energy we expel, money we spend etc is in ensuring that our work at Seacroft Grange is completed to a GOLD standard; not as an aim but rather as a minimum expectation. Our curriculum takes the investment of time, effort and money to ensure that it benefits our children. Find out more about school's GOLD standard here.

Intent 

The curriculum at Seacroft Grange stems from the National Curriculum as a minimum standard. However we believe that we have created an offer that is nurturing, developmental and designed to get the best out of our children and make them as ready as they can be for the next steps in their education and lives. It is the responsibility of classroom teachers to plan high-quality learning from this National Curriculum base. Primary Education isn’t just about knowledge and skills but experiences that children will remember well into their adult years and hopefully set them up for a life of (and love of) learning.

The whole-child is a key driver for our curriculum. Our children need to be loved and nurtured and therefore the universal offer and more bespoke offer for our children includes many aspects which support the development of children not only educationally but Socially, Emotionally and by encouraging positive Mental Health (SEMH). We have a good PSHE scheme of work in place alongside more bespoke offerings such as nurture provision and support from cluster services around specific needs for a child/family. We have also embraced the 'Thrive approach' in our school. 

Experiences are integral to the curriculum at Seacroft Grange Primary School. We have the 84 experience promise; a promise that each half-term, from Reception to Year 6, every child will engage in one class-level experience and one whole-school level experience; making 84 in total across their Primary career. Such experiences may be in class, involve a visitor or workshop; they may include going out of school as class or indeed a whole-school trip e.g. the beach; a stately home. These are designed to build cultural capital and provide experiences to make abstract concepts more concrete and bring to life what they read about in books. We want these experiences to be remembered and to benefit children’s spoken language and ability to write – with direct knowledge – about a range of things. Ofsted Inspection of school in 2016 commented on how this approach (a pledge at the time) not only supported the curriculum but also children’s development socially, emotionally, spiritually and culturally and in their understanding of being a British Citizen and their understanding of Fundamental British Values. Details of this promise can be found under the curriculum tab on the Personal Development page.

Knowledge is key to children’s development – within this children need to have a rich and varied vocabulary to be able to articulate their knowledge in spoken language and in writing. Research tells us that vocabulary at a young age is a key indicator of future academic success and as such we pay lots of attention to the way we engage children with and teach explicitly about vocabulary. It features heavily in the way we implement our curriculum as you will see throughout our curriculum documentation (e.g. knowledge organisers).

We want all children, no matter their background or ability, to develop a deep understanding of the curriculum they are learning; connecting 'old' knowledge to new knowledge in a sequential way. Knowledge is also key to allowing a particular skill to be performed. Knowledge should be remembered and is key that this knowledge is sequenced and built upon to develop children’s schemas as they move through their education. We want our children’s lives to be enriched through the knowledge they retain. We want children to use their knowledge to understand new things that they encounter; using this knowledge to comprehend. The inter-connections between year groups, key stages and subjects are detailed in our curriculum documentation. Retention and retrieval of this knowledge is planned into our curriculum and is explicitly placed within our school day during 'Do Now' tasks that take place at the beginning of each day, after play and lunchtime and between subject transitions. A link to the research informing our Do Now practice can be found above. 

In the demonstration of skills is where we often see children shine – their ability to ‘do’ something and apply their knowledge. We want our children to master their skills across our curriculum and ‘have a go’ at things that they wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to. We want our children to learn skills that will support them as they move on in their education. Reading is a key cornerstone of this skill strand and through the choice and use of high-quality texts we plan for the development of knowledge in communication and language, listening and attention, understanding and speaking. Lots of collaborative work with our partnership schools in the Leeds East Primary Partnership Trust (LEPP) has supported us in this aim. Skills are a capacity to perform based on what is known. Often quoted is how reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out – we want our children to be articulate speakers, skilled comprehenders, readers and writers and our curriculum offer is designed to ensure that this happens in all areas of the curriculum.

Implementation

At weekly staff CPD sessions we talk a lot about consistency and coherence being key but conformity being the killer of creativity and stifling the skill of the best teachers. Therefore our curriculum implementation is designed as an offer - a framework - on which teachers can build and deliver in the way that suits their teaching styles and children’s needs and wants for learning. The basic premise of implementation is in line with school’s learning and teaching policy (separate document). English and Maths provision is more explicitly documented in ‘The Book – a guide to GOLD’ (separate document). English and Maths remain key drivers for the rest of the curriculum and 'The Book' serves to articulate how the remainder of the curriculum is given high priority in the overall curriculum at Seacroft Grange. The Book serves to codify the practice that we have in our subject teaching and is available above.

Knowledge organisers are currently available  for all subjects outside of English and Maths - using the key questions from the medium term plans to support teaching and assessment. 

An example of a knowledge organiser  is displayed below (completed knowledge organisers for each year group can be found in the year group links above)

The knowledge organiser is used by a teacher for planning and marking – this will be the only expectation of where teachers mark children’s work in subjects other than English and Maths – a one stop shop for teachers and children to understand what children know/can do (or don’t know yet!/can’t do yet!). Activities will take place – these are up to the teacher to decide – which support the development of this knowledge and these skills.

Impact

There are of course external measures of school’s performance in a narrow number of subjects:

EYFS, Year 1 Phonics, KS1 SATs (until 2023), Year 4 Multiplication Test and KS2 SATs. Internal tracking of English and Maths against end of year frameworks are also completed for all year groups and are more fully explained in our assessment policy.

Subjects other than English and Maths (and possibly Science) are difficult to be tracked by year group as the National Curriculum is not split up in this way (rather into key stages). As such it would serve little purpose to say a child is or isn’t at age-related expectation in History, for example, a term into Year 4. However Knowledge Organisers are designed to be able to support our judgements as to how a child is performing within a programme of study.

At the beginning of a new topic/theme the teacher will complete a cold task; asking children what they already know. Before children are 'launched' into their new learning children will be encouraged to make connections in an informal 'pre-launch' session discussing what learning has come before which supports upcoming learning and also discussing where the learning will go as they move through school. This supports retrieval of knowledge and allows children to see that learning is progressive. Children will be introduced to the key vocabulary and ask to plot this on a ‘stages of knowing words’ cline (children are familiar with these from their classrooms). Children will then be introduced to their knowledge organisers. Teaching and learning will take place over a number of sessions and the children will then be asked to now think about what they know and reacquaint themselves with the stages of knowing words cline. These ‘end of topic’ tasks along with the pink and green highlighting on the knowledge organiser  (in line with school feedback and marking policy) will allow the teacher to support their judgement of whether a child has gained the necessary knowledge and skills for a particular topic of a particular subject. This will help, to build up a picture of how a child is performing in a subject over time – using the knowledge organisers and children’s books to showcase this. This way the purpose of assessment is purely for the benefit of the child and the adult knowing where a child is with their learning. The assessment is not designed to be a useful tool for school's leadership or external scrutiny but rather clear evidence of progress for a child and their teacher. This, in turn, is designed to satisfy leadership and external scrutiny as children receiving a good quality of education and children making progress is the purpose of our role as educators.