Curriculum Overview

Autumn Term (click / tap to expand)

Spring Term (click / tap to expand)

Summer Term 2024

Intent

We strive to provide high quality education for every child. The aim of our curriculum is to inspire children to learn in creative, purposeful ways to enable them to achieve academic and personal success.

We aim to develop children with enquiring minds; instil in them a love of learning and deliver learning that is purposeful, relevant and builds on children's experiences. Our curriculum is broad, balanced, creative and challenging.

Our curriculum not only meets the requirements of The National Curriculum but also the needs of our children in our school. We promote children’s growth mindset and collaborative learning, as a means to build resilient and ambitious learners. We aim to ensure that every pupil who enters our school leaves at the end of Key Stage 2 at least at the Age Related Expectation for all subjects, demonstrating deep knowledge, skills and understanding.

Furthermore, we want to ensure that our children develop into aspirational, successful young people who are confident, well-rounded and able to make considered and informed choices, both when progressing to secondary school and in later life. With an ever-changing world, we aim to work with the local community, as well as exploring wider national and global issues, to prepare children to be successful, responsible citizens of the future.

The curriculum is underpinned by the Vision and Values of the school.

Hook Junior School’s Vision

We believe that we should enable children to develop socially, academically, culturally and spiritually within a caring atmosphere underpinned by strong values.

In order to achieve this we will pursue a number of objectives, including:

• strive for all children to achieve high personal standards in all areas of their learning and their development
• establish a firm foundation of positive attitudes, skills and understanding
• prepare children to understand themselves as learners and to regard themselves as lifelong learners;
• seek to develop active learners with lively and enquiring minds who are self-motivated, self- confident and independent;
• provide a creative and inspiring curriculum built on an integrated thematic approach which is delivered through stimulating, investigative activities and first hand experiences that challenge and motivate children to learn;
• recognise, celebrate and praise personal achievement in all areas of school life;
• promote high standards of behaviour, respect and care underpinned by strong values;
• provide a well-organised, challenging, stimulating and secure learning environment

These aims and their cumulative development are illustrated in our Values Model, which aligns key national curricular objectives with the values and characteristics we aim to develop in each and every individual child.

Each subject is valued in its own integrity, with concepts identified across the curriculum to support children to make connections and deepen their learning. Attached are the skills progression documents for each subject, which outlines the concepts, skills, knowledge, understanding, key vocabulary, texts and global citizenship links.

Curriculum Implementation

We value active learning experiences delivered creatively where children are encouraged to take responsibility and ownership of their learning so that learning is relevant, purposeful and engaging. Children are encouraged to ask questions and explore their learning in collaboration with other children and adults.

Assessment for learning (AfL) is at the heart of our teaching and learning and both children and staff regularly review their work, within and outside of the lesson, providing appropriate questioning, support and challenge. We ensure that learners understand the small steps they need to go through and use flexible and responsive teaching to move children on when they are ready. We provide them with opportunities to apply and develop their learning following clear modelling and demonstration of skills, building on their prior learning.

Mistakes in learning are celebrated as children have an understanding that we learn from our mistakes; we promote a growth mindset and resilience in all aspects of school life and beyond. This is embedded throughout our curriculum, as well as discrete teaching on developing children’s learning behaviours, personal and British values within our PSHE curriculum and through our mental health strategy, where we support children to develop skills and attributes that they can develop now and continue to apply into adulthood.

Throughout the school, learning is underpinned by key concepts which then drive the learning across all subjects. This supports children to make connections between their learning and enables children to think more critically and challenge their understanding on bigger ideas.

Often, learning begins with a hook to engage children into a concept or topic and provides children with memorable, purposeful experiences that they then build their skills, knowledge and understanding from. These are identified in each subject’s progression document, designed as a sequence of learning. At the end of a unit of work, children are then given the opportunity to showcase their learning to their families and the wider community in a learning event once a term. Units of work can last a couple of weeks, half a term or even a term, dependent on the concepts and content.

Where relevant, reading and writing skills are developed alongside the key concepts to provide learning opportunities which are purposeful and engaging for all children, covering a range of genres. The development and application of high quality language and vocabulary is embedded across the curriculum, whilst the teaching of reading is also taught explicitly to all children daily using high quality books. In addition, the school promotes a love of reading with a daily class story and other reading initiatives and support programmes to ensure that children leave school as competent, confident and passionate readers.

Maths is taught with a focus on mastery teaching, encompassing three main dimensions for depth: conceptual understanding, mathematical thinking and mathematical language, with reasoning and problem solving at the heart of our curriculum.

All subjects are valued and have their own integrity. Our RE curriculum is developed from the Hampshire Living Differences Syllabus. Other subjects follow the National Curriculum as a minimum expectation with links to local, national and global links and projects, outlined in our curriculum progression documents.

Curriculum Impact

Across the school and in partnership with schools within the local authority, we use regular and robust triangulated monitoring to gauge the impact of our curriculum design. Leaders at all levels review learning, talk with our children and provide feedback to move practice forward.

• We ensure that our children’s attainment and progress are in line or exceeding their potential. We measure this using national data (where appropriate), our curriculum assessments and monitoring evidence.
• Our curriculum ensures that we develop well-rounded citizens with a clear understanding of values such as empathy, responsibility and respect.
• Learning dispositions are developed which leads to success both now and in the future. Children demonstrate greater levels of resilience, motivation and a growth mind set when faced with different types of challenge. They develop attitudes and dispositions to make a positive contribution to the world. Our daily interactions provide a regular check on this.
• Our children will be motivated by a strong personal sense of morality. They will be able to make sense of an increasingly globalised, complex and rapidly changing world. They will make decisions for the right reasons they will be able to decide what is right and what is wrong and will be resilient to the influence of others. The children develop an awareness of how their own actions can impact others and the wider community. They will go out into the world and make a difference in their own life and to others.