At Flanshaw Junior, Infant and Nursery School, we have an ambitious curriculum that has been carefully designed to meet the needs of our pupils. Our School motto is: Education in Mind, Community in Heart, Success in Life! ​This motto is woven into all aspects of our curriculum and school life. ​We aim to develop resilient, aspirational learners that are fully prepared for future education and can make a valued contribution to their local community.  At the end of their curriculum journey, we have the ambition for our pupils to:

Our curriculum has been carefully designed to address our school drivers, with a golden thread of ‘Communication and Language’ running through it.

At each stage of curriculum design and implementation, we endeavour to incorporate our school drivers to ensure that children leave the Flanshaw Family as well rounded, caring and respectful members of the community. 

At Flanshaw we believe that children must have access to an engaging, inspiring and challenging curriculum that encourages them to become independent and resilient learners.  Learning experiences should be exciting and memorable and we should utilise every opportunity to encourage our children to better themselves and make a difference to their own community

School leaders have identified the key knowledge areas that our children need to learn and they ensure that knowledge progresses effectively as the children move through school.  The curriculum is carefully sequenced so that the most important knowledge is retained by our pupils.

When designing the curriculum, leaders ensured that:

• The knowledge for each subject area is clearly mapped out and progressive.
• Specific substantive and disciplinary knowledge is identified in each lesson and is prioritised.
• Specific pedagogical approaches ensure that the most important knowledge is retained.
• The curriculum incorporates the ‘Character of Effective Learning,’ ensuring that teaching and learning tackles these characters.
• The outdoor classroom is incorporated effectively into curriculum design and a wide range of inspiring, meaningful educational visits are used to ‘hook’ children into learning and create memorable experiences.
• Curriculum design ensures that our pupils are taught in an active, collaborative environment that facilitates speaking and listening improvement and helps our children to build resilience and respect others.

Knowledge, Skill and Vocabulary overview

For each area of the curriculum, leaders have mapped out the age-related knowledge, skills and vocabulary that we expect each pupil to learn.  The KSVs incorporate the National Curriculum programmes of study and are continually reviewed and adapted to ensure that knowledge areas are progressive and revisited to consolidate learning.  They map out the substantive and disciplinary knowledge for each subject area, in each year group.

Knowledge Overviews

The knowledge organisers look more closely at the key knowledge that is taught in each unit of work and in each individual lesson, particularly the substantive and disciplinary knowledge.  Curriculum leaders map out this knowledge so that the most important knowledge is consistently delivered in every year group. These documents also outline the key vocabulary for each lesson as well as the opportunities to develop the golden thread of ‘communication and language.’  To ensure that prior learning constantly feeds into current learning, the prior knowledge that is pertinent to this unit is identified by leaders.

To ensure a consistent pedagogical approach to teaching and learning we are prioritising the following:

For each subject area, leaders have created ‘pedagogy’ documents to ensure that a consistent approach is embedded across the curriculum.  Each aspect of the lesson has been designed to aid knowledge retention and the application of previous knowledge to aid current learning:

Flashback 4:  At the start of each lesson, the pupils will undertake ‘Flashback 4.’  This task requires them to answer two questions linked to the previous unit and two questions to check knowledge from the previous lesson.  This will have a strong focus on ‘talk’ at the start of the lesson to engage the pupils.

Observe and Identify: We have strong focus on formative assessment to ensure that misconceptions are quickly addressed.  Following input, teachers will observe and identify the pupils and quickly intervene if pupil’s have not fully understood the learning intentions.

Memory Mole knowledge checker: At the end of each lesson, the learning of all pupils will be assessed using the memory mole knowledge check.  This will help the teacher to identify any misconceptions within the group.

End of unit quiz: After all of the panned knowledge and skills have bene taught, the pupils will complete an end of unit quiz to assess their understanding and knowledge retention.  The outcomes of this quiz will then feed directly into the content of the ‘review and re-teach’ lesson.

Review and re-teach session:  In this lesson, teachers will use the end of unit quiz and the knowledge checker formative assessment document to plan an extra ‘review and re-teach’ lesson.  In this lesson, concepts will be re-taught, misconceptions will be addressed and some pupils will be challenged to complete an ‘application task’ to demonstrate their ability to apply their learnt knowledge.

This approach will be utilised in the Knowledge heavy subjects of Science, Geography, History and French where we feel that specific knowledge areas need to be consolidated to ensure that pupils don’t finish the unit of work with gaps in their knowledge.

In the more practical subjects such as computing, music and PE, teachers will challenge the pupils to apply all of their skills and knowledge that they have acquired in the lessons in an end of unit task or performance.  This will give further opportunities for pupils to evaluate their own success and for teachers to analyse the progress they have made.  In RE and PSHE, the Jigsaw curriculum encourages pupils to evaluate their successes at the end of each lesson.

Leaders recognise that pupils learn differently in specific subjects; therefore they have identified specific questioning approaches and modelling styles for their curriculum area that will support pupil development.

Investment in high quality teaching resources

We have invested in various high-quality curriculum and planning resources to ensure that teachers have access to well-researched, quality resources to share with the pupils.  This helps to create a more consistent approach and it ensures that subject knowledge in each curriculum area is strong.  We utilise the Kapow scheme for Geography, History, Computing and Science, where as the ‘Jigsaw’ programme is used to support the delivery of RE and PSHE.

Questioning approaches and Kagan structures

Teaching staff ensure that teaching and learning is underpinned through the implementation of ‘Kagan’ cooperative strategies.  A wide range of partner and group work structures are incorporated into lessons to encourage all children to actively participate in sessions, in turn developing their communication and cooperation skills.

We also base our questioning and modelling approaches around Rosenshine’s principles of instruction; these are used in conjunction with the Kagan structures.