At Barlow Hall our Curriculum is designed so that children:

Build subject knowledge and have an entitlement to powerful, culturally rich knowledge.

 

We will always link back to prior knowledge, linking back to something they already know.

We will build subject breadth and essential general knowledge and extend our children’s horizons.

We will build cultural experiences  and British values into our curriculum

We believe that children need knowledge in order to be creative

We will build knowledge with vocabulary, increasing the words that children know and use

Our children will read a range of books that will extend their background knowledge of the world, building text complexity as they develop.

 

Our curriculum breadth:

We follow the required curriculum (England’s National Curriculum) and include other aspects, beyond the requirements of the national curriculum, for example, aspects of our Personal, Social, Health and Citizenship curriculum.

The more our children know the more they can connect and think about.

Powerful knowledge enables our children to think the unthinkable and that not yet thought.

 

Our Whole School Themes (Year 1 - Y6)

Our Home

Life in Britain through the ages

Our Planet

Making a difference

Voyage and discovery

The struggle for power, control and equality

 

How we will implement our curriculum:

We believe that learning is a change in long-term memory.

We know that the more we present and revisit content, the more likely they are to remember, ensuring that required knowledge is stored in the long term memory.

We will vary contexts to give new meaning, making connections explicit as we teach.

We will teach so that children:  learn about….learn through…and learn how to….

We will carefully organise and sequence what we plan for our children over a day and a week. We will keep returning to learning to ensure this transfers into long- term memory. 

 

Concepts:

Concepts are the way in which we give meaning to our curriculum breadth. We will use concepts to build a strong understanding. They are the building blocks of our learning.

We have subject specific concepts and Thinking concepts, which enable us to connect our knowledge together. Our thinking concepts are across everything, we do. We relate everything new to our concepts.

Our curriculum is designed to keep moving forwards and backwards where children return to concepts over again and again moving from a basic understanding to an advanced understanding.

 

Our Thinking Concepts are:

Change and continuity over time, Inter-relationships, perspectives, similarities and differences, analysing and interpreting and cause and effect.

 

Progression:

Our curriculum is designed to take our children from a basic understanding, where children are using their working memory and are novices, to an advanced understanding where children have developed a long term memory and are experts.

We have designed a two-year progression model. Children move from knowledge building in nursery, years 1, 3 and 5. To knowing and making decisions and applying these fundamentals at reception, years 2, 4 and 6.

For some children this progression model will take longer and for some children they will reach a greater depth of understanding where they are able to demonstrate non-routine thinking .

 

Please see the download overview  which summarises our curriculum design.