What does your child learn at school each day, each week, each year and during each Key Stage of their education?  Read more about our curriculum intent, implementation and impact here and visit pages dedicated to each subject to find out more specific details.

Eureka’s Curriculum

Intent:

Eureka’s Curriculum is designed to ensure depth, breadth and balance at its core.  We place the upmost importance on providing children of all abilities, backgrounds and needs access to a wide-ranging curriculum that immerses them in learning, broadens their horizons and challenges them at every step of their journey through Primary school.  We value effort and progress as well as attainment.  The curriculum is designed to ensure that children acquire subject specific knowledge whilst at the same time developing a rich and varied vocabulary and skills that can be applied in a range of contexts and subjects.    These skills and the subject knowledge are taught in a logical sequenced progression through the EYFS, Key Stage One and then Lower and Upper Key Stage 2.

Our curriculum is shaped and influenced by the local environment and is influenced by the talents and needs of the local community.  We pride ourselves on being at the heart of the community and strive to maximise engagement with it.  We have designed our curriculum so that children learn about our local area’s geography and history and have the opportunity to compare this to the wider world around them.  We teach children to contribute positively to the local community and wider world and foster high aspirations in all.

Eureka’s curriculum is not static – it is based on needs of the pupil’s and the needs of society.  As these evolve over time so does our curriculum.

Implementation:
The intent of our curriculum is clear.  This is how we are ensuring that our curriculum delivers on it’s intent:

Our curriculum has been designed from the ground up ensuring that progression through the year groups is challenging but always age appropriate and is always building on the knowledge and skills learnt previously.  Subject leaders have assigned key knowledge and key skills to each year group for their subjects and monitor this regularly.  Teachers and pupils then set out to answer key questions within a subject during which practitioners teach the appropriate skills and knowledge whilst constantly planning for opportunities to challenge pupils through longer extended tasks, reasoning challenges or by posing problems that need solving.  Our classrooms are vocabulary rich with displays highlighting key vocabulary for each subject and words of the day being displayed and taught.

Our teachers use bespoke pre learning tasks to help to find any misconceptions that may have developed through previous learning and use this information to adapt their plans appropriately.  Our marking and feedback policy has evolved to ensure that feedback to pupils is timely and effective and that learning is guided not only by the teacher’s plans but also by the pupil’s needs.

To ensure that our curriculum is bespoke and unique to our community we have created a database of local amenities, learning resources, experts and services that the school can access and make contact with to enrich our curriculum.  Subject leaders have created key questions linked to our local circumstances for each year group.  We have also reached out to the local community and fostered a positive relationship with a growing number of volunteers, all of whom bring unique skills, local knowledge and experience to the school.  We actively engage parents through parent mornings, ‘Wow’ days, workshops, coffee mornings, parent forums, parent evenings, achievement assemblies and curriculum days as well as other special events.

At Eureka we keep our curriculum under constant review, with regular meetings to discuss what has gone well and what needs improving.  Subject leaders are given time to discuss their subjects with the team and when needed are given time to feedback to staff their findings from their monitoring and share any changes they wish to make to teaching expectations.

Formative assessment is used by staff to inform planning adaptions prior to, within and after lessons in all subjects.  Staff give whole class feedback and ensure that groups needing additional support get it and those that would benefit from more challenge also receive this.  Independent post learning tasks are used to gauge children’s understanding and application of knowledge and skills followings a series of teaching and learning activities.  A range of formal summative assessment is also used in core subjects to provide additional information to class teachers and provide standardised data that can be analysed by subject leaders.

Impact/Achievement:

Our curriculum has a clear set of intentions and senior leaders, subject leaders and teachers are using clearly defined systems in their planning, teaching, feedback and assessment.  So how do we know if all of this is positively impacting on our pupils and on our community?  How do we measure what we value?

At Eureka we believe strongly in listening to the opinions of the triumvirate of stakeholders at the school: 

We regularly undertake pupil questionnaires, pupil interviews and examine pupils written feedback.

We also administer parent questionnaires, hold parent forums and have an open door policy towards parents.

Senior leaders also give staff opportunities to give honest feedback about policies and procedures and take into account their feedback from staff meetings and professional discussions.

Data is used effectively at the school and all staff have a good understanding of how to analyse data and how to act upon the trends it shows.  The expectation is that subject leaders analyse their subjects data and feedback to staff, offering advice and support when necessary.  Senior leaders analyse whole school data for the core subjects and feed this information back to teachers and to the head.  This data is then discussed at pupil progress meetings where support is put in place for pupils who need it and interventions are planned from this data.

The members of staff at the school also take part in regular monitoring activities such as book scrutinies, learning walks, moderation of judgements and lesson observations.  Feedback from these monitoring activities is given to members of staff and future actions given.

Overseeing all of this is the governing body that meets regularly to review data and question the effectiveness of teaching and learning at the school.

Click on the wheels below to find out more information about our curriculum and each subject.  If you would like to speak to someone in school about our curriculum then please call us on 01283 216451.