KS2 CURRICULUM

Learning Journeys

Curriculum Overviews

Curriculum Intent 

The curriculum at The Royal Alexandra & Albert Junior School is designed to be engaging, broad and rich. It is a curriculum that evolves, based on the needs of our children, recognising and celebrating the differences and changes in the world around us. It considers the local context of the school, experiences and backgrounds of our children and provides them with relevant and memorable learning experiences to enable them to become rounded successful citizens. It supports and promotes the vision and values of our school where all members of the school community are equally valued and respected.

Our vision is to nurture and develop the whole child through our Gatton Aims, a set of values which will enable them to reach their full potential in all aspects of life. Children leave the Junior School, ready for Secondary School, equipped with the experiences, skills and knowledge they need to function as young people and adults in the 21st Century. They develop a sense of belonging and desire to contribute and influence their local and global communities.

The curriculum is inclusive and aims for all students to be challenged. It focuses on vocabulary development and experiences, which increase children’s cultural capital to allow them to reach full potential. It fulfils the requirements of the National Curriculum through ambitious and challenging enquiry led learning, with clear progression and specific learning goals for every subject. It is deep, allowing children to return to and build upon previous learning, applying skills and knowledge to new challenges.

All curriculum leaders show understanding of key concepts related to curriculum design, ensuring there are clear skills, knowledge progression and sequencing, allowing all members of the school community to fully understand the rationale behind our curriculum.

Depth

Our curriculum is carefully designed, organised and planned for depth of learning.

Our definition of progress is; the widening and deepening of essential knowledge, skills, understanding and learning behaviours.  We design, organise and plan our curriculum to ensure that children are not merely covering content but achieving a depth to their learning, which enables them to use their skills, and understanding in all areas of the curriculum. Our careful curriculum design and planning means that we build in many opportunities for repetition and practise. This ensures that children are able to revisit previous learning, which allows them to gradually develop a deeper understanding of the skills and processes within subjects, at their own pace and in the best possible way for each individual child. 

Balance

As leaders and as a whole school, we carefully design, plan and implement a curriculum to provide balance for every student.

It is our underlying belief that every child should feel valued and experience the feeling of success in a wide range of curriculum areas. We believe that through the curriculum we can impact on what is in children’s heads and how they feel about themselves, so that they feel intelligent, confident and ready to tackle any challenge they may face. We have designed, organised and planned our curriculum to ensure every child receives an appropriate mix of academic and personal development, which means that in practice our curriculum places equal importance on core and foundation subjects.

We understand that children will not be successful learners unless they are emotionally secure, therefore we carefully design our curriculum and adopt a flexible approach to timetabling to ensure that we can meet and respond to any issues which may arise. Children’s physical and mental wellbeing are as valued and important as academic development.

We carefully monitor children’s progress with their personal development and our well-planned and thoughtful approach to the Spiritual Moral Social Cultural curriculum (SMSC) helps to ensure that every child is well cared for and supported. Our balanced approach to the curriculum is not at the expense of high standards in core subject areas. High standards and enabling children to reach national expectations and above is of vital importance if they are to succeed at the next stage of their education and go on to achieve full and happy lives and careers. Our full and rich curriculum, with its excellent range of experiences, ensures that every child has the opportunity to make excellent progress both academically and personally. Our unique curriculum ensures that every child is given the opportunity to shine and flourish.

Breadth

We carefully design, plan and implement a curriculum, which provides breadth for every student. Our curriculum is one in which provides:

  • Creativity - we aim to provide experiences that allow the child's creativity to flourish and develop ways to creatively approach all areas of learning
  • Diversity - we aim to provide experiences that allow children to recognise and celebrate the diversity in our world, both on a local and global scale and understand it is their duty to challenge prejudice in all its forms
  • Enquiry - we aim to provide experiences where children can be curious and find out about the world around them, with teachers being their facilitator of learning
  • Environment – we aim to provide experiences, which help our children, value their environment and understand their responsibilities towards sustaining their local and global environment.

Our curriculum is further enriched through local community visits and projects, school trips, visiting speakers and residential trips.  We firmly believe that real life experiences like these create lasting memories and strengthen the learning which they encounter in school. 

We understand the crucial role parents have in promoting learning beyond the school gate and ensuring children make the best possible progress.  We pride ourselves on being an open, friendly and approachable school that encourages parents to be actively involved in children’s learning.  As well as Parents Evenings, we host regular events to inform parents how they can support their child or to come and work alongside their child.

We have designed and planned our curriculum to offer a range of experiences, which contribute, to every child receiving a full and rich curriculum.  This supports and promotes our culture and ensures that our children benefit from a full range of academic and SMSC activities.  These activities enrich their lives and those of our whole school community and make them proud of their British values and diverse society to which belong and play an active part.

We are proud that our curriculum gives our children the skills, confidence and self-belief to lead a happy and fulfilled life by encouraging them to aim high, dream big and work towards their goals in life.

The National Curriculum is used as a basis for designing our curriculum to meet the needs of our children while at the same time offering a unique curriculum, with a clear progression of learning and specific learning goals for every subject.

SMSC development, alongside Fundamental British Values are woven throughout our curriculum and embedded in all subjects.

For more information, visit the subject pages.

Organisation

The Junior School is organised into immersive cross-curricular topics. The topics vary in length, but are planned to last up to a term. This allows us to create exciting learning journeys and respond to the needs of the children.

There is also time and space for whole school topics (e.g. Book, Maths, Outdoor Learning or Science weeks), topics that reflect contemporary events (e.g. the Olympics) and topics devised by the children or teachers’ personal interests.

Mathematics, English, Reading and Phonics are taught daily, providing comprehensive coverage of the key skills which will reinforce learning and deepen understanding.

Enrichment

As well as designing a stimulating engaging curriculum, we are committed to providing enrichment opportunities that enhance learning and contribute to the children’s learning experiences:

Forest school and outdoor learning, local trips, educational visits, residential trip in Y6, enrichment activities with hub schools, sporting fixtures, drama and performances, visits, theatre groups and speakers.

We firmly believe that our children learn beyond the classroom. For this reason, every class has a planned Forest School and Outdoor Learning lessons throughout the year. The children have opportunities to make use in planned lessons or sessions in Gatton Park. During these sessions they build shelters, cook on a campfire, go pond dipping or bug hunting, play team-building games and do some really exciting activities linked to our curriculum topics. We believe that learning outside the classroom is essential for our children's mental health and well-being.

The outdoor learning environment is also used throughout the school and we encourage children to learn outdoors wherever possible using the outdoor classrooms, Japanese garden, rock garden, school fields, the lake and our dedicated forest school areas.

Impact

Our curriculum has an ambition for high achievement of all students.

This achievement is represented in two key areas:

  • The standards children reach in statutory curriculum areas at the end of key stage 2, in relation to their progress and attainment
  • In reality, we will be measuring how effectively our curriculum helps our students develop into well-rounded individuals who embody our values and carry with them the knowledge, skills and attitudes, which will make them lifelong learners, and valuable future citizens.

 

The Junior school receives PE and Sport Premium funding. Further details can be found on our Policies page.

If you would like more information about the Junior Curriculum please contact the Head of the Junior School, Mr S Greenwood.