Vision
A nurturing inclusive community where everyone will grow, learn and improve together; academically, socially, culturally and emotionally. At Village Infant School we celebrate challenge, learn from our mistakes and persevere and grow together.
Curriculum Intent
At Village Infant school we are committed to offering an inclusive curriculum to ensure the best possible progress for all of our pupils whatever their needs or abilities. The curriculum is broad and balanced allowing pupils to acquire skills and knowledge in a range of subjects. Our curriculum is language rich, with reading at the heart of everything we do. We believe our children deserve a curriculum that provides them with enriching experiences, and enables them to develop the knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes necessary to prepare them for, and help them succeed, as members of the wider community. Our curriculum is based upon our core values of perseverance, resilience, curiosity and kindness. We understand that children need to feel safe and happy to learn, to grow, to make mistakes. We support children to think with a growth mindset, to embrace challenge and the belief that everyone can grow their intelligence and talents. We nurture our children so they can grow as learners and citizens and apply our core values to every aspect of their lives and learning.
At Village our curriculum is built around a rainbow of concepts
Curriculum Implementation
The curriculum is inclusive and we use a wide range of strategies to ensure a personalised approach to meet the needs of all pupils. We aim to close the gap from word poor to word rich by identifying key vocabulary for each lesson and introducing new vocabulary with a special ‘word of the week’. For pupils who need additional support, we provide group and 1:1 intervention to build attention and listening skills, and develop both receptive understanding and expressive abilities. We have a consistent approach across the school and provide targeted interventions at all stages to support communication and language development, regardless of ability. Subject leaders have created subject overviews to show the progression of knowledge, skills and vocabulary in each subject from Nursery to Year 2. Teachers within each year group use these overviews to organise the learning into infant friendly topics that address the needs of all pupils. Each subject is taught within these topics or if more appropriate through lessons outside of the topic to ensure full coverage of the National Curriculum. Prior knowledge is explored at the beginning of each topic and lesson, this knowledge is then enriched and developed throughout the topic/lesson leading to an assessment and celebration of learning. Reading is at the heart of our learning through exploration of quality texts. Subject leaders provide key texts and vocabulary for each topic in order to further develop knowledge, understanding and language.
To help our pupils improve teachers need to find out what they know and understand. For this to happen teachers plan for pupils misconceptions to be identified, explored and challenged, to make transparent the links with their prior experiences and to provide multiple opportunities and scaffolding to make those links with new information. At Village this happens through the development of a growth mindset culture, the co-construction of success criteria across the curriculum, a policy of ‘no hands’ and the use of random learning partners as a key feature of classroom discussion.
Our curriculum inspires pupils to learn, it is broad and balanced valuing all curriculum subjects equally to ensure our pupils thrive in our diverse society, respecting all groups. We combine foundation subjects and core subjects to make cross curricular links so learning is more purposeful. We provide pupils with enriching experiences, visits and visitors within each topic to make their learning meaningful and memorable and broaden their experiences. We also encourage families to explore a range of key experiences with their children out of school (20 things to do before you leave Village Infant School).
Our core values are central to our curriculum. They are taught within topics and on their own in assemblies and lessons using core texts that embed the values through reflection on characters actions and feelings. We encourage our wider community to embrace our core values and celebrate regularly with parents when their child has shown perseverance, resilience, curiosity or kindness.
A growth mindset culture is embedded throughout the school and a series of lessons is taught in each year group to support pupils to learn how to receive feedback, speak about their learning, embrace challenge and not fear failure or making mistakes. Together with our core values this inspires pupils to engage with the curriculum and grow as lifelong learners.
Curriculum Impact
Children are assessed during every lesson, enabling teachers to plan next steps for each child. Teachers assess against the National Curriculum learning objectives and the required knowledge and skills for each year group, for each subject. They then provide live feedback which enables each pupil to make progress within the lesson and over time. The impact of the curriculum is reviewed regularly and progress is measured against end of year outcomes for individual pupils and for the year group. The impact of the school’s curriculum can be seen in the children’s exercise books and class floor books, during learning walks, through pupil voice, and the outcomes for all groups of pupils within the school.
Our curriculum is child-centered, and allows pupils to make connections in their understanding, attitudes, skills and knowledge that are vital across all subjects in life. Consequently, children will feel safe to try new things and will demonstrate resilience, perseverance, curiosity and kindness in all they do, and understand the benefits of thinking with a growth mindset when faced with challenge. Pupils will have the ability to work collaboratively and independently as inquisitive learners who will be motivated to learn.
Our curriculum builds a strong foundation for pupils to develop positive attitudes to learning and face life’s future challenges. Pupils will have high levels of self-efficacy (the belief that you are capable of performing a task or managing a situation) which will enable them to achieve successful outcomes and be able to thrive as educated citizens in a culturally diverse modern Britain.