Our Curriculum Intent
At Racemeadow Primary Academy, we believe that our curriculum is one that is broad, balanced and ambitious for all. It is exciting, relevant, meaningful and responds to the needs of the individuals within our learning community, enabling them to excel academically and flourish socially, emotionally, physically, morally and culturally.
At Racemeadow, we believe that the curriculum should be seen in its widest sense – as the entire planned learning experience, including formal learning opportunities as well as events, routines and enrichment activities that take place outside the classroom.
Also, running throughout our curriculum are the core values of our school - Relationships, Pride and Ambition, together with the British Values of Individual Liberty, Mutual Respect, Democracy and the Rule of Law.
Key Principles of our Curriculum:
Using the EYFS Framework, the Sonar Curriculum and a variety of other carefully selected materials, the full range of core and foundation subjects have been carefully mapped out across school ensuring clear progression in knowledge, understanding, skills and concepts.
We also ensure that we provide all children with opportunities for wider experiences through activities such as trips, residential visits, the daily mile, extra-curricular sports, arts and music clubs and our REAch2 11B411 initiative which aims to offer all pupils 11 amazing activities during their time at Racemeadow. These include hiking hero, messing about on the water, 10 good deeds, create something amazing, make or break a REAch2 record, ride a large animal, seeds to support, shake it up Shakespeare, culture vulture, wildlife warrior and sleep under the stars.
Our Curriculum Implementation
Within the EYFS, there is a combination of adult-led, teacher taught sessions and a wealth of stimulating continuous provision opportunities when adults scaffold learning through skillful interactions and questioning. The EYFS curriculum covers the areas of Communication & Language, Physical Development, Personal, Social & Emotional Development, Literacy, Mathematics, Understading the World & Expressive Arts & Design.
Throughout KS1 and KS2, we have carefully adapted the ‘Sonar Curriculum’ ensuring it is bespoke to Racemeadow in order to motivate, engage and inspire pupils through a series of learning journeys that we call 'Mini Missions'. Each Mini Mission lasts half a term except in Autumn 2 when children may also complete a Christmas themed Mini Mission.
We use the carefully sequenced objectives within the ‘Sonar Curriculum’ as our vehicle to deliver learning in Writing, Science, History, Geography, Art and Design and Design Technology.
The beginning of each 'Mini Mission' is designed to hook all children in and acts as the launch to their learning. All learning (except Art) related to the 'Mini Mission' is captured in one book.
To prevent the creation of tenuous links, discrete subjects are taught where appropriate. RE is taught following the Warwickshire Agreed Syllabus, Maths follows the White Rose Maths Hub planning sequence, Music is based on the Charanga scheme of work and online resources, Get Set 4 PE is used to ensure high quality PE provision, Purple Mash is used to deliver the Computing curriculum and KS2 French is planned and delivered using Primary Language Network.
Our PSHE curriculum has been created by a working party of PSHE subject leaders from across REAch2 and comprehensively covers the statutory guidance outlining the content that schools must cover. In addition, it includes non-statutory aspects such as economic well-being, careers and enterprise education and personal safety, including assessing and managing risk.
Providing children with access to a range of high-quality texts is an integral part of our curriculum. We believe it is our role to ensure children leave us being able to articulate themselves clearly and read and write confidently and effectively. In addition to key texts linked to Mini Missions and those used in Guided Reading Sessions, each year group has a carefully planned selection of texts which are used during class story times.
Across the school, high quality learning environments support and celebrate children’s learning across all curriculum areas.
Central to all of the above is an expectation of well thought out quality first teaching and learning delivered by all. Continuing Professional Development is a priority for our staff to ensure they have the skills and knowledge necessary to deliver the highest standards across the entire curriculum. Subject leaders have the necessary expertise to play a pivotal role in both the design and delivery of their subject area; ensuring a clear progression of both skills and knowledge across all year groups, underpinned by a robust assessment system. They can articulate how learning is revisited and developed year on year, to ensure a real depth of learning across the school.
We ensure that continued improvement is the focus of our monitoring schedule by focusing on how staff can share good practice between each other, what areas for improvement they have and what high quality CPD can be provided to support their improvement.
We believe that parents play a crucial role in their child’s learning and as a result do all that we can to keep parents informed about our curriculum. This includes: sharing half termly topic webs and vocabulary sheets, holding regular parent’s evenings, inviting parents to assemblies and school productions, inviting them to parent partnerships sessions where they can work alongside their child and ensuring that informative reports are sent home at the end of the academic year.
Our Curriculum Impact
As a result of our carefully planned and skilfully implemented curriculum, we would expect the impact to be that:
We will measure the impact of curriculum through: