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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.

Special Educational Needs and Disabilities

At Marton Primary Academy and Nursery, we pride ourselves on being a highly inclusive school. We ensure that every child receives a high-quality and ambitious education. We have high expectations for all our pupils and they are all supported to achieve the highest levels of success. We create a positive and supportive environment for all our pupils, without exception. By doing this, it places SEND policy and practice at the heart of school priorities.

To help pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) reach their full potential, they first must have equal access to our curriculum. High quality teaching (HQT) is the starting point for meeting the needs of pupils with SEND and is based on strategies that are in the repertoire of every teacher in our school. These strategies are used for all pupils and then applied flexibly in response to individual needs. Weaving inclusive approaches into everyday, high-quality classroom teaching supports SEND to become part of the fabric of our whole school and curriculum, rather than being seen as a ‘bolt-on’.

We ensure that reasonable adjustments are made to enable children with SEND to access a full curriculum and to enrich the experiences of all pupils. In addition to high quality teaching, some pupils will require additional support in the form of high quality, structured interventions to accelerate progress. We therefore complement high quality teaching where appropriate with carefully selected, evidence based small-group and one-to-one interventions.

At Marton Primary Academy and Nursery, we all very much see ourselves as teachers of SEND and understand that good practice for our children with SEND is good practice for all children.

(See Adaptive Teaching Policy)

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.

Subjects

To find out more about our curriculum please contact Mrs Coyle, Principal: admin@mpa.bright-futures.co.uk

Proud to part of the Bright Futures Education Trust
Marton Primary Academy & Nursery
Whernside, Off Highfield Rd, Marton
Blackpool FY4 5LY
Ofsted CEOP