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Castle Acre Primary School

Curriculum

Our Curriculum Intent

We have carefully thought out our curriculum, looking at what our children need, what we want for our children and what we feel will support them as they move into the next step of their education and futures. We believe that school is a holistic experience, and should enable our children to succeed academically and blossom as individuals, experiencing joyous learning opportunities that stimulate the desire to learn and explore, to marvel and to wonder. Therefore, our curriculum intent is as follows:

  • To foster a love of learning through enabling all children to participate in enriching experiences and opportunities that nurture them to become confident, powerfully curious and driven to discover

  • To demonstrate engagement and independence in thinking and learning and to have a toolkit for problem-solving

  • To teach about respect, responsibility, kindness, courage, hope and forgiveness in a Christian environment built on shared values

  • To enable children to be positive citizens of their communities and to 'Let their light Shine'

  • To teach children to celebrate individuals for who they are, valuing diversity and different groups 

  • To provide a nurturing environment that ensures our children feel valued, listened to and that they have a voice, all of which develop a sense of self-worth and belonging

  • To build on the strengths of their local communities, and to challenge and widen their view of the world, explicitly teaching equality for different groups 

  • To ensure children are prepared for their next steps and to allow them to experience failure leading to success, and to develop ambition, resilience, determination and joy linked to challenge

  • To provide the semantic and declarative knowledge and vocabulary necessary to develop deep memory

  • To ensure that children are given experiences that allow for deliberately chosen and sequenced personal development as well as those seizing those that arise 

  • To allow repeated practice of skills in a range of contexts that, together with rich experiences, allow children to successfully meet their next life learning challenges

Our Curriculum Priorities

  • To meet the curriculum intent above

  • To deliberately focus on our children's identified needs, developing their vocabulary, their spelling and grammar, building their cultural capital and broadening their experiences of diversity

  • To teach and give children regular chances to explore British values (Tolerance, Rule of Law, Democracy, Individual Liberty and Mutual Respect)

  • To ensure that explicit opportunities are created and seized to focus on our Prevent duty and E-safety

  • To include our local heritage which is immediate to our individual schools, our Federation and to Norfolk

  • To identify substantive and disciplinary concepts for each subject and to ensure that units of work are appropriately spaced and revisited to encourage deep and long-lasting learning

  • To plan and teach units of work that are deliberately chosen and logically sequenced so that they build on prior knowledge and learning and prepare our children for future learning

  • To allow children to develop and flourish spiritually, wondering, marvelling and growing

  • To become confident in courageous advocacy, supporting themselves and others to be change makers

  • To have a 'hook' into learning - an authentic purpose

  • To have a trip, visitor or experience for each unit of learning

  • To have books woven through our curriculum which support children's learning

  • To have vocabulary explicitly taught, displayed and used

  • To develop oracy

  • To ensure that the knowledge links that our curriculum is building are made explicit and clear to our children through discussions in lessons and through a 'learning links' display in all of our classrooms

We are clear in both our staff code of conduct and general staff discussions that we are politically impartial in our teaching. 

In order to support our mixed age year groups we work using a Year A and Year B curriculum, with carefully thought out objectives that build on the previous year's learning through different units and foci. Below you will find our curriculum documentation.