Planning for progression
At Alpington our curriculum is structured to ensure that children make progress in all subjects. Each subject has specific procedural, conceptual and substantive knowledge that needs to be taught, nurtured and developed so that the children make progress in their recall, understanding and ability to apply what they have learnt.
English, both reading and writing, forms the backbone of our topics. Children use their reading and writing knowledge across all aspects of the curriculum.
Geography, history, art and DT along with aspects of computing, music, science and RE are taught at part of topics. Topics are carefully planned to weave subjects together, providing learning with a context and purpose and promoting creativity. The core content for each subject is allocated to individual topics. For more information about Topics, please click here.
Where subjects cannot be taught as part of a topic, they are usually taught in a block over one or two weeks. RSHE is usually timetabled weekly.
Maths is usually taught as a stand alone subject, but aspects are taught as part of topic where it is meaningful to do so.
Key knowledge (procedural, conceptual and substantive), specific to each subject has been identified and sequenced, setting clear expectations for children at the end of each Key Stage. Knowledge is categorised using the words from our curriculum vision – curious, thoughtful, empathetic and resilient (describing how we learn) and (courageous and aspirational) what we do with what we have learnt.
The knowledge progression grids grids clearly identify what each word looks like for that particular subject and level of development. Teachers use these progression grids in their planning, talking about learning, feedback and in classroom displays. These words represent the knowledge and attitudes that we want all our children to take with them when they leave Alpington.
This planning ensures that the children’s personal development is planned as part of every aspect of learning at our school. You can see a further explanation of how this language is built into our curriculum by clicking here.
Resilience is defined separately and used in every subject.
