At Bearwood Primary School we are committed to ensuring that all children are fully prepared for the next stage of their educational journey, and to go on to be successful, compassionate and productive adults with integrity.
We want our children to make secure progress in their learning, keeping up and even excelling, rather than a need to catch up. This means we carefully assess where children are and plan for their next steps in learning. We do this through the mastery approach, with the expectation that all children will be at age-related expectations or above unless they have particular learning needs. We ensure a clear progression throughout every subject of the curriculum, carefully developing children’s skills and knowledge. We want our children to effectively build on previous learning – knowing and remembering more as they journey through the school.
Our children are developed to be literate and numerate, and are given daily opportunities to apply key literacy and numeracy skills across the curriculum. Indeed, high quality texts form a very important part of our curriculum offer. We also enable our children to question and comprehend new information, and make important connections. We want our children to have strong skills of collaboration, communication, creativity and high-order thinking, as we believe these are important skills for them to develop into confident, decent and compassionate citizens. We want our children to understand the world in which they live, and how it has become that way. We want them to understand their place in the world, and their interconnectedness with others. We want them to have a firm grasp of time and place – locally, nationally and internationally.
Our curriculum offer is developed to be inspiring as well as progressive. Whilst journeying through Bearwood, our children will develop a rich cultural capital from the exposure they will have to the wide range of topics they encounter. Every half-term, children will engage in an educational visit or interactive workshop which has been carefully selected to ensure all children have rich experiences. At Bearwood we have devised and agreed 'Golden Threads' which run through subjects in our curriculum. These are the key concepts taken from within the National Curriculum which drive our curriculum design. Each Golden Thread addresses a key area of learning which is repeated as children move through our school. These also allow us to use these as a set of assessment foci for each subject. Golden Threads are referred to when planning and during lessons, so that our children are able to make links with their previous learning and see how this has been built upon as they move through their primary education at Bearwood. These combine skills and knowledge into concepts which allow our children to develop transferrable learning between subjects and topics.
We develop our children’s characters through our focus on values, also developing within them a growth-mindset. This will set them in good stead to be successful, compassionate and productive adults with integrity.
