Curriculum
Our Curriculum is the beating heart of our school day. At Perton First School, everything starts with the child and how we can design a learning environment for them, which nurtures their mind, body and soul to develop a happy, healthy and well-rounded citizen of the world – a child who can live and enjoy life to the full. One of the central aims of our curriculum is to ensure that our pupils are both “interesting and interested”. We want them to be ‘interesting’ to talk to because they know a great deal about the world and ‘interested’ in finding out more. We understand that knowledge is ‘sticky’, in other words, the more pupils know the easier it is for them to know more.
Intent
We want our pupils to have big ambitions and high expectations of themselves. We are an outward looking school, with a strong sense of community and we aim to create a curriculum that truly meets the needs of our children. We want our children’s voices to help drive and shape our curriculum; a rich, exciting and balanced curriculum, which enables each individual child to develop academically, emotionally, creatively, socially and physically. Our 'project' driven curriculum will enable children to share ideas, express their opinions and apply knowledge and skills learned in a wide range of meaningful contexts. It will offer opportunities for all children to investigate, question, debate and challenge and enable all children to flourish and to be the very best they can be.
Implementation
We have the National Curriculum and Early Years Curriculum as starting points which we enhance and deepen further as a school. Learning is organised into 'projects', which are the drivers of our curriculum. Projects are our way to ensure learning has a meaningful purpose, is relevant to our children and our locality and that learning is revisited in a wide range of contexts. At the heart of this is our children being exposed to high quality experiences and learning opportunities with a large element of choice and need for independent thinking. Children are immersed in experiences with visits or off timetable days of discovery. Children deliberately have only one large book in which to record their curriculum journey. This strengthens the message that our curriculum is 'built in' and not 'bolted on'. It is not a weaker relation to core subjects that only happen in the afternoons. We are Romans, Anglo Saxons, Egyptians, explorers, artists, athletes, musicians and scientists, morning, noon and night. We really do 'dive right in!'
Impact
From their different starting points our children will make good progress academically, emotionally, creatively, socially and physically. Knowledge, understanding and skills will be secured and embedded so that children attain highly and are fully prepared for the next stage of their learning journey. Attainment and progress is measured using a mixture of formative, summative and standardised assessments, which enables us to compare achievement with national and local figures. These assessments are mapped and progress is tracked on our assessment tracking system, ‘Insight Tracking’. They will have strong communication skills and will listen respectfully to the views of others. Our project driven approach to learning provides the opportunity for children to apply their communication skills in real-life scenarios. Children will take pride in all that they do, always striving to do their best and will demonstrate emotional resilience and the ability to persevere when they encounter challenge. Our project based approach enables children to encounter challenge and facilitates them in the development and refinement of the necessary skills of perseverance and emotional resilience. Our children will develop a sense of self-awareness and become confident in their own abilities from constructive feedback from adults and peers . They will be kind, respectful and honest, demonstrate inclusive attitudes and have a sense of their role in our wider society.
Equal Opportunities and Inclusion
We ensure that the school meets the needs of all, taking account of gender, ethnicity, culture, religion, language, sexual orientation, age, ability, disability and social circumstances. It is important that in this school we meet the diverse needs of pupils to ensure inclusion for all and that all pupils are prepared for full participation in a multi-ethnic society.
Access to the Curriculum
All children have an entitlement to a broad and balanced curriculum, which is differentiated to enable children to understand the relevance and purpose of learning activities and experience levels of understanding and rates of progress that bring feelings of success and achievement. Teachers use a range of strategies to meet children’s special educational needs.
At Perton First School all class teachers are responsible for providing a curriculum that is suitable for all pupils in the class, including those with Special Educational Needs or Disabilities (SEND), with support from the SENCo. We have high expectations for all pupils and are committed to ensuring our curriculum complies with the Equality Act 2010 and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014. Our inclusion statement emphasises the importance of providing an inclusive learning environment for all pupils including those with SEND.
Our Pupil Offer Map
What experiences is my child entitled to while they are at Perton First School?
To provide you with the answer to this, we have created our 'Pupil Offer Map' which you can view by clicking the image below.
Our Curriculum by Subject Area
To find out what Perton First School children learn in each subjects area, follow the links below.
Curriculum Planners 2022-23 with Parent Links
For each half term, we create 'Curriculum Planners' for each year group. Within these documents, there is a brief overview of the learning taking place in a half term and useful resources for parents/carers that could be used to support children at home.
Click on the icons below to access the relevant half term's learning.
New planners will be added on a half-termly basis.
Curriculum Documents
I am a...
Our subject leaders have carefully considered the journey that our children take in each subject. The below files are our 'I am a...' documents. Each of these documents outlines our aims for children by the time they leave our school in each subject. These are split into four categories:
1. Vision & Values - The vision for the subject and the values we want our children to have.
2. Head - The knowledge we want our children to have.
3. Hand - The skills we want want our children to have.
4. Heart - The feelings we want our children to have.