Our Curriculum

Intent

At Marton Primary Academy and Nursery we aim for all our children, from Nursery to Year Six, to:

be highly competent in the basic skills of Reading, Writing and Maths.
be able to use and understand a wide vocabulary and communicate appropriately and confidently to each other and everybody in our community.
foster a love of reading.
be able to show empathy with each other.
be challenged and have the skills to excel from challenge.
learn how to respect each other.
appreciate all that is on offer in our local community of Blackpool and have high aspirations for the future.
develop the learning powers of perseverance, collaboration and resilience.

Implementation

We determined the breadth of our curriculum by considering the specific needs of our school community, ensuring learning is relevant and purposeful.
All subjects within the National Curriculum are included in our breadth of study, with subjects taught discreetly.
We believe learning is a change to long-term memory and therefore knowledge and skills are carefully sequenced.

We provide further opportunities to extend the children’s cultural capital, through our Passport for Learning.

We have a coherently planned curriculum, underpinned by our curriculum drivers. Each subject has:

A map of the breadth of topics that we cover.
The ‘threshold concepts’ (the big ideas) children should understand.
Milestones, which are the criteria for progression, within the threshold concepts (basic, advancing and deep).
Proof of Progress tasks which enable us to assess the children’s depth of understanding.
Our children are introduced to new knowledge before being asked to use and apply that knowledge in
a purposeful way, at a later stage.
When units are introduced for the first time, children are provided with increased direct teacher instruction, supporting their acquisition of new knowledge. Children are likely to be working at the fundamental stage of a milestone, basic stage, when they visit the unit for the first time.
When units are revisited, children are given the opportunity to apply the new knowledge gained, in a variety of ways. They are encouraged to communicate, explore and create something new of value. By this point, children are likely to be working at the advancing or deep stage of the milestone.
Teaching and learning during the first meeting of a unit of work is mainly teacher led and is therefore likely to look different to the teaching and learning during consequential meetings of the topic, when there is an increased focus on pupil led collaboration, exploration and creativity.

Organisation

English and Maths are taught daily.
Extra Maths sessions are taught twice a week.
PE is taught twice a week.
PSHE, RE, Music, ICT and French are taught weekly.
History and Geography are taught alternate weeks.
Art and Design and Technology are taught alternate weeks.
Each class has a designated weekly library session.

Impact

At Marton Primary Academy and Nursery, children are assessed during every lesson to enable our teachers to plan the next steps for each child. Teachers assess against the learning objectives and the basic skill requirements for each year group and provide live feedback which enables each child to make progress within the lesson and overtime. Children are expected to make good or better progress in all subjects and this individual progress is tracked and reported to parents and carers at parents evening and on the end of year report.

The intended impact of our curriculum is that children build knowledge, make connections between different knowledge acquired and use it to explore and create. When pupils begin working within a new milestone they are likely to be working at a fundamental stage. By the end of the milestone, most pupils will have sustained mastery of the content, e.g. when they have fluency in procedural knowledge (skills) and strong, semantic understanding they are assessed as working at an advancing stage within the milestone. Some pupils demonstrate a greater depth of understanding. Their use of procedural knowledge (skills) is automatic and they use their semantic knowledge to make connection that are not obvious. These pupils are assessed as working at a deep stage within the milestone.

We use rigorous monitoring throughout the year to measure the impact of our curriculum design. Senior Leaders and Subject Leaders monitor individual subjects: reviewing learning, evaluating pupil voice, providing individual feedback to move practice forward, celebrating positives and highlighting areas of development that through coaching and continued professional development are developed and strengthened.