Curriculum Statement for Hugo Meynell Primary School  

Our ethos and values:  (Intent)

We are committed to the principle that our school curriculum is at the heart of our children’s education.   We want our children to leave Hugo Meynell having had the best possible education that has also been enjoyable and fun.  We passionately believe that we must nurture every child from the moment that they join our Early Years unit that gives them a safe and secure start to their formal education through to leaving us, equipped for the exciting new challenges of secondary school. We see primary education as a series of opportunities that go into their personal virtual toolbox of skills, knowledge, understanding and experiences.  Our curriculum has been designed to take full account of the legal requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum and the Primary National Curriculum and our school curriculum is built upon this core.

Our work is underpinned by our core Christian values which are to be loving and caring; honest; respectful; resilient; forgiving and fair.  It is our belief that everyone should be treated in a way that we would wish to be treated.  We want to support our children to learn to make the right choices, which is becoming ever more important in the world of social media.

Our relationship with parents is critical in supporting our children as they develop as citizens of the 21st century.  Our school is an important part of our local community. We have many volunteers and visitors.  We work hard to establish links to ensure that the children understand that they are part of a vibrant community that is proud of their local school.

We make sure that every child has a range of opportunities both inside and outside of the classroom.  Our extra-curricular offer is a very special feature of our school, from visitors bringing expertise, to a wide range of clubs to develop areas including creativity; musical experiences and sporting excellence through to residential visits.

Our principles of education

We have established our principles of education, which include pace, progression, resilience, and challenge.  We see learning as a series of building blocks that need re-visiting at different times in a child’s journey through school to make sure that they are secure.

We define these principles at Hugo Meynell as:

Pace: Our children need sufficient pace to enable them to achieve all of which they are capable, whilst ensuring that their hunger for learning is met and no time is wasted.

Progression: Learning is planned effectively to build on prior knowledge and learning experiences. Formative assessment is used to plan accurately for the next steps in learning.

Resilience: We endeavour to support all children to develop learning resilience, i.e. being willing to take a risk and to keep going, even when learning is difficult.  We see this as an essential learning behaviour for life for children at all ability levels. One of our values is to persevere and never give up.

Challenge: Our motto is ‘aiming high, supporting dreams’.  In practice this means that we have a culture that encourages children to recognise and welcome challenge, through skilled questioning; expecting children to find answers for themselves; providing challenge that takes children beyond their learning comfort zone.

Our curriculum design: (Implementation)

Our curriculum defines what we want our children to know and be able to do by the time they leave the school. The national curriculum is the skeleton on which we build our school curriculum.  We implement our curriculum through a topic-based approach.  We use elements of a range of published schemes that are adapted in-house to meet the needs of our children and context, for example, White Rose maths, selected because it has a staged process taking children from the concrete concept to the pictorial concept to the abstract concept leading to fluency in the areas of problem solving and reasoning.

Progression and sequencing

During 2017-18 we created a curriculum map that provides a progression model for the school.  In the past academic year, continuing into 2019-20, our focus is on clarifying our curriculum intent (vision) and implementation for each subject by reviewing our planning and identifying further cross-curricular links.  We recognise that deep learning takes place when we build upon prior knowledge and there is a sequential repetition of content to consolidate learning.  An example would be a topic on growing seeds in Y1 and then looking at the parts of a plant and their function in Y3 then studying photosynthesis in more detail in Y6.  We understand that sequencing is about teaching things in the right order to enable children to acquire and retain knowledge in order to demonstrate skills.

Assessment of the curriculum

We use formative and summative assessment processes to enable us to make accurate judgements of both attainment and progress. This enables us to identify any gaps in knowledge or skills and to adapt our planning to fill these gaps.  Knowledge gained by regularly reviewing our assessment processes and outcomes, enable us to continue to develop our Hugo Meynell curriculum to inform and improve on future curriculum design.

Impact

The impact of our school curriculum is that we develop well-rounded, confident children who achieve their personal best. The success of our curriculum can be measured in the feedback that we receive from our secondary schools about how well our children settle into the next stage of their formal education and continue to thrive.