Our Curriculum Aims         s 

Inspiring a love of Learning

We aim to provide a broad, rich and stimulating curriculum at Victoria Road which develops pupil confidence, resilience, self-esteem and independence. This is underpinned by our Core Values of 'Courage, Enjoyment, Fairness, Respect and Honesty’

Through the curriculum, we are committed to provide our children with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life, inspiring a love of learning that will remain with them throughout their lives beyond Victoria Road. We want to ensure our children are fully prepared for life in modern Britain.

Our Curriculum includes and builds upon the National Curriculum and maximises  cross-curricular opportunities.  In addition to being knowledge rich, our curriculum is underpinned by our values with a focus on well-being and social and emotional mental health. This means that we nurture the whole child ensuring that they are fully equipped to deal with the next stage of their learning journey with the necessary attributes to become successful citizens.

We understand the context of our community and school and work hard to remove barriers. For this reason, our curriculum is language rich and is designed to diminish the difference for disadvantaged pupils. We organise the knowledge to ensure that it is creative, purposeful and meaningful, has high expectations and inspires a love of learning for all.  It is built on the belief that ‘Learning is a Journey’. We create environments, opportunities and stimuli for children to learn more and optimise their learning. 

At Victoria Road we are passionate about reading and understand that this is an essential skill to create a solid foundation for learning in all areas. We aim to create cross-curricular links through our core texts to embed rich interconnected learning and provide a framework for future understanding. 

We recognise all learners are individual: some children require greater challenge to deepen their thinking further and some require additional support. Evidence shows that children need to be able to understand a concept, apply it in a range of situations and then be creative to show a depth of understanding. In essence, we believe that in order to meet the objectives securely, children need to have mastered them. 

By the time our children leave Victoria Road, our aim is that they will have mastered the curriculum. They will have a depth of understanding and have the oracy skills to reason, articulate and debate to become confident lifelong learners.

 Implementation

Planning:

We have devised long term plans which show the coverage for each year, ensuring that the basic requirements of the National Curriculum have been met but also that there is a richer curriculum offer that is tailored to our school.

We plan topics and themes as we believe that young children learn best when they can see relationships and make connections to their learning, putting learning into a context. In order to support progression and assessment, when teaching this way, we make it clear to the children which subject they are learning about within each theme. 

These long term plans are translated into medium and short term planning where teachers plan the details of what the children will be learning and plan appropriate to their age and stage of development. These are live documents that are constantly under review and improvement. It is important to meet the needs and interests of our pupils and for teachers to reflect on their practice.  

Key Vocabulary:

Developing oracy is a priority for us and key vocabulary will be introduced, revisited and extended as children progress through the year groups. Planning specifies when key vocabulary will be explicitly taught and this is shared with children and parents through our use of knowledge organisers.

Partnership with Parents:

We believe in working closely with our parents and have adopted a more creative approach to home learning. Each half term, children are asked to complete a task from a choice of activities that is inspiring or creative and linked to their learning.  We also offer the more traditional home learning to reinforce reading, spellings and multiplication tables.

Our main aim is that our curriculum must inspire a love of learning so that children develop curiosity and a lifelong desire to learn.  Teachers also build into the curriculum explicit opportunities to enrich the learning such as using the outdoor environment, trips and visitors to school. We build in themed weeks focusing on whole-school initiatives.

 Impact

By the time our children leave Victoria Road, our aim is that they will have mastered the curriculum. They will demonstrate curiosity and a desire to acquire knowledge and experience the world around them, understanding that learning enriches their lives beyond the classroom.  They will have a depth of understanding and have the oracy skills to reason, articulate and debate to continue the journey of confident learning throughout secondary school.