CONTEXT

INTENT – We come to school every day to… make a positive difference to ourselves, our school and our community every day, we do this by:

Curriculum Intent

Our curriculum is designed to provide, through a range of inspiring and engaging experiences, the knowledge and skills to become independent, life-long learners. We aim for all our children to leave equipped with key skills, which enable them to be confident, respectful, skilful, ambitious and positive individuals, who are reflective and able to make good choices.

We place emphasis on a curriculum that develops the whole child. Through our school values – Succeed together, Tolerance, Aspiration, Resilience, Friendship, Independence, Stay Safe and be Happy - we ensure that the wellbeing of all members of the school community is at the centre of our life in school and the key to raising academic success.

Our children gain a sound knowledge of their own value and purpose, with the ability to make choices and decisions in life that show their understanding of right and wrong.

We believe that children deserve a balanced curriculum that enables them to develop a deep understanding of all subjects and the interconnections between them.

The rationale for our Taylor Road Maestro Curriculum takes the form of 10 big ideas that provide a purpose for the aspects, skills, knowledge and contexts chosen to form the substance of the curriculum. These big ideas form a series of multi-dimensional interconnected threads across the curriculum, allowing children to encounter and revisit their learning through a variety of subject lenses. Over time, these encounters help children to build conceptual frameworks that will enable a better understanding of increasingly sophisticated information and ideas.

Our curriculum offer is designed and adapted, in order to challenge, engage and motivate our learners to take responsibility for themselves and others. Our ultimate goal being that they progress academically and become honest, successful and confident individuals, who make positive contributions to the community and society - both now and in the future. We have developed our curriculum so that it is designed to support children with retention of subject knowledge and to develop long-term memory skills.

Implementation

The Big ideas are covered in full through a range of Knowledge Rich Projects. Half termly Curriculum themes are based on: Science (core subject), History, Geography, Art & Design and Design & Technology. Although links are made where appropriate, the subjects of R.E., Music, MFL (Spanish), P.E., PSHE and Computing are taught as stand-alone subjects. Subjects are supported as follows:

Maths – White Rose 

English – our own bespoke novel-based curriculum 

R.E. – Leicester City Sacre Syllabus 

PSHE – Jigsaw 

Computing – our own bespoke Computing curriculum

Music – Leicester/shire Music Hub

Curriculum Maestro - History/Geography/Science/Art & Design/ Design Technology

P.E. - Rising Stars

Spanish – Language Angels

In addition to this, a range of whole school enrichment activities take place throughout the year such as Black History Month, Science week, Maths Week, Art Week, STEAM week etc. These projects enrich learning, deepen knowledge and enable us to provide bespoke learning experiences that meet the specific needs of our school community. Subjects within our curriculum are carefully sequenced to ensure that knowledge and skills and built upon throughout key stages and year groups. Class timetables are organised so that there is adequate time given to all curriculum subjects.

Using our long-term overviews as a starting point, we develop our medium-term and short-term planning to ensure coherent coverage of key knowledge, skills and concepts and clear progression routes over a sequence of lessons. This allows for prior learning to be systematically built upon and key knowledge to be revisited. Planning is supported by subject progression documents so that lessons give children the opportunity to use and apply the skills they are developing so that they know more and understand more. This is monitored by subject leaders and links to the Teaching and Learning and Assessment Policy. 

Children with SEND are included in all aspects of the school day. They are provided with quality first teaching, differentiated to their needs. Specific 1:1 or small group intervention is provided to support their Phonics, Maths or Literacy learning. Interventions such as ELSA, Colourful semantics or Fun Time are incorporated into the timetable. Speech and language development is provided by trained teaching assistants and Learning Mentors support children’s learning in ‘Butterfly Room’ – a classroom which follows Early Years principles for some of our children in EYFS and KS1 with complex needs.

Across the curriculum, children are given regular opportunities to explore, question, investigate, evaluate, and reflect on their learning. These crucial experiences strengthen children’s subject knowledge and embed life-long skills for our children. Oracy is the golden thread that weaves together all teaching and learning at Taylor Road. Having confident speaking and listening skills enables our learners to express their thoughts, feelings, understanding and ideas fluently. It also helps them to clarify their thinking and to understand new concepts. From the first days in school, speaking and listening plays a large part in a child’s progress in all curriculum areas and teachers plan for the development of these skills in a wide variety of ways. We Voice 21 benchmarks to implement oracy in our school. This enables us to have an ambitious vision where we can build a culture of oracy within, and across, our curriculum and school life. 

We also have a clear focus on the teaching and acquisition of new vocabulary. We use knowledge organisers (a set of key facts or information that pupils need to know and be able to recall to master a unit or topic) and make them available to the children during each project. This way, we help our pupils remember what they are learning and see the bigger learning journey in their subjects. The curriculum is closely monitored by subject leaders to ensure full coverage of the national curriculum, that there is depth to children’s learning and to ensure that appropriate adaptions are made to suit the learning needs of our pupils.

Impact

IMPACT - The aspirations of our curriculum are for: