Curriculum Intent At Brenchley and Matfield
At Brenchley and Matfield Primary School we have a strong and embedded learning culture, in which pupils throughout the school are taught the important skills that they need to take them through each stage of their learning journey.
At Brenchley and Matfield we strive to ensure that no child is left behind, each child and adult is valued and supported to be the very best that they can be and are inspired to be so. We value difference and diversity, and our school is highly regarded in respect of aspirations and support for all pupils including those who are very able and those who have additional needs.
Our curriculum is planned and sequenced so that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before towards the national curriculum end points. Our aim is to provide knowledge and skills that pupils need and can use in order to take advantage of opportunities, responsibilities and experiences as they go through life.
We aim to equipped pupils with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to be successful citizens. It is essential knowledge that pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said and helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement. (National Curriculum)
There are also occasions throughout the year when the whole school undertake a joint experience. Examples of this include the whole school, World Book Day, Christmas, Easter, Harvest Celebrations and Safer Internet Day
Each subject curriculum and its associated teaching approaches secure the highest possible quality of education for our pupils.
Four closely-related curricular attributes – scope, rigour, coherence and sequencing – define that quality. These four curricular attributes are the means and measure of strong curricula because they ensure that the subject properly reflects the academic practices, outside of school, to which the subject refers and they ensure that this is organised in the best way to allow pupils to make progress and to thrive in their study of each subject.
In all subjects pupils tackle two closely linked types of content, each dependent on the other. These types of content are known as substantive content and disciplinary content. Each plays a vital part in securing scope, coherence, rigour and sequencing.
This is the substance that pupils learn in each subject – the building blocks of factual content expressed through accounts (stories, descriptions, representations, reports, statistics, source material, commentaries, explanations and analyses) and the vocabulary (concepts, terms and technical language) that enable pupils to move about within their own knowledge. Thus, pupils gain the internal reference points that allow them to recognise the patterns, notice the contrasts, ask the questions and discuss the options that the disciplinary content will demand.
The substantive content of each subject curriculum at Brenchley and Matfield is:
For the scope, coherence, rigour and sequencing to achieve its full benefit for pupils, the substantive content must be taught with ‘high-leverage’ activities, so that pupils think hard about the substance itself, so that they assimilate and retain material efficiently and so that they gain confidence from their fluency in foundational concepts, terms and reference points. In this way vocabulary will become extremely secure, with the range of vocabulary that pupils recognise growing all the time and creating resonance as pupils encounter it again and again, both consolidating that vocabulary and freeing up memory space for pupils to make sense of new material.
This is all that pupils learn about how knowledge is constantly renewed in each subject’s ongoing development, outside of school, by its practitioners (historians, geographers, philosophers, theologians, artists). It teaches pupils that the sum of our knowledge is not fixed, that it is constantly being tested and renewed, that there are standards of truth for such renewal. This constant quest for better and better understanding of our world inspires both awe and humility in all of us.
Every time pupils are shown how scientists, geographers, archaeologists and artists have worked together to reach a particular finding, we are all inspired.
How does the wider curriculum support literacy?
The combination of all subjects in the curriculum provides the powerful knowledge that, if thoroughly and securely taught, builds the wide and secure vocabulary acquisition that underpins literacy and all successful communication. We know that pupils only read with the speed necessary for fluency when they have adequate prototypes for abstract words and phrases, and when their densely structured schemata allow them to ‘chunk’ the incoming text for meaning. Vocabulary size is the outward sign of the inward acquisition of knowledge.
Moreover, the types of account that form each subject’s processes and products – its narratives, analyses, arguments – give pupils continuous, focussed practice in reading and writing, both fiction and non-fiction. Pupils’ reading and writing will always be richly grounded in stimulating content in which pupils will be increasingly secure, and always driven by a clear disciplinary purpose.
Every lesson is, therefore, a lesson playing a central part in improving reading, even when a text is not actually being read! The range of reading pupils do in these lessons will be extensive. Pupils’ extended speaking and writing is likewise transformed by the richly diverse vocabulary and the secure, fascinating stories that have underpinned that vocabulary acquisition.