Parent HandbookThe curriculum is the body of knowledge our students learn while in the Primary phase at Gildredge House.
It is best explained through the answers to three questions:
- Intent: What should students know by the time they leave the Primary phase?
- Implementation: How do we teach our curriculum?
- Impact: What do the students know, remember and understand?
The vision of the ambitious Primary curriculum at Gildredge House
Throughout the Primary phase, we seek to continue on from the excellent start from the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), by providing a caring and supportive learning environment, developing firm foundations to be built upon throughout the students’ school journey and beyond.
Just as in the EYFS stage, we aim for the students’ school experiences to be happy, active, exciting, fun and secure, while allowing them to take risks and develop their growth mindset through giving students opportunities to see that mistakes are not failure, but opportunities to learn. Students are actively encouraged to engage in their learning, both inside and outside the classroom and to develop physically, verbally, creatively and intellectually, while embedding a positive attitude to their learning.
We believe that kindness, consideration for others, resilience, perseverance and courage are all equally as important life skills, as academic attainment. Through our Gildredge House Way of being ‘Ready, Respectful and Safe’, we encourage our students to relate to one another with confidence, care, openness and respect. We believe that a strong partnership with parents influences the good attitudes to learning at home and in school.
We have identified three key intentions that drive our curriculum:
Intention 1: To build a curriculum, rich in language, with appropriate subject knowledge, skills and understanding so that students reach and exceed their potential.
Intention 2: To build a curriculum which nurtures students’ learning behaviours of collaboration, independence, resilience, leadership and develops a curiosity for learning, to enable them to meet and exceed their potential.
Intention 3: To build a curriculum which ensures students develop crucial life skills and positive moral traits so that they understand their role within the community and wider world; to be aware of the law and being mutually respectful, while understanding what it means to live in a democracy and to experience cultural capital, which they use to make links across their learning, to prepare them for their future success.
SEND Provision
We recognise, as a school, the importance of ensuring that those students identified with particular needs, including those with Special Educational Needs and/or Disabilities, have access to an ambitious Primary curriculum. We, therefore, aim to plan first for our students with SEND, with appropriate tasks, support and level of challenge to enable them to access the curriculum.
Values
The values that underpin our curriculum are:
| Ready | Respectful | Safe |
|---|---|---|
| · Ready for Learning | · Appreciating the actions of those around you | · Allowing others to learn |
| · Ready to do the right thing | · Sharing things with others | · Looking after the school environment and the wider environment |
| · Ready to admit when something has gone wrong | · Being polite to those around you | · Making good choices |
| · Ready to put things right |
Implementation
Our three key intentions are used to drive curriculum implementation, alongside appropriately evaluated educational research. With these in mind, the Primary curriculum is designed to provide a broad and balanced education that meets the needs of the students. At Gildredge House, we believe that this should build on the students’ starting points when they leave the EYFS.
In the Primary phase, the students from Years 1-6 follow the National Curriculum, alongside elements of the Cambridge Curriculum. As we know that Primary students learn best when they are able to make connections across their learning, we plan termly themes in History, Geography, Science and Art and Design, with the students generating the questions they want to find out the answers to as a starting point.
Our Subject Leaders ensure that the different curriculum areas are progressive in terms of their objectives, with opportunities to revisit learning to ensure it is embedded.
Being an all-through school provides Gildredge House with a unique opportunity to ensure that the curriculum offer continues into Key Stage 3 and beyond, as students move through the Primary phase, having access to Secondary specialist teaching in Physical Education, Computer Science and Science.
Curriculum Principles
- Each subject has time to contribute effectively to learning.
- High quality texts.
- Reading, first and foremost.
- Sequencing of concepts and progression of knowledge and skills.
- Closing the vocabulary gap.
- The promotion and use of an accurate and rich cross-curricular vocabulary throughout the Primary phase, planned in all subjects.
Wider Curriculum
- Students offered the opportunity to learn a musical instrument.
- Students offered the opportunity to be part of a student leadership group.
- Educational visits, including residential opportunities.
- Student-led assemblies and performances.
- Visitors.
- Learning outside the classroom.
- Responding to events in the news.
- Charity events led by students.
- Competitive sport opportunities.
- Wide range of extra-curricular activities on offer from Key Stage 2.
- Visits to sites of historic, spiritual and cultural importance.
For details on the impact and evaluation of the curriculum, please see our Primary Curriculum at Gildredge House [PDF]
We are pleased to report that Gildredge House has been judged ‘Good’ by Ofsted.