Abbeymead Primary School

The Abbeymead Ready for Life Curriculum

At Abbeymead, our curriculum is focused upon preparing our pupils to be ‘Ready for Life’. Our aim is to ensure that children leave us with the knowledge and skills, self-confidence and resilience to be happy and successful as they move on through education and into the workplace and society. We work to instill what we hope will be a life-long love of learning in all of our pupils.

Our curriculum is designed to provide a rich and deep education that specifically meets the needs of the pupils, and allows each and every one to achieve their potential. We ensure high quality learning and outcomes, the development of critical thinking skills, and the effective teaching of essential knowledge, skills and understanding; the building blocks for later life.

Our co-curriculum, The’ Ready for Life’ Award Scheme goes beyond the requirements of the National Curriculum in providing experiences outside of the classroom that further support our pupils in becoming responsible, balanced and well-informed members of society. We are grateful to our parent community for their support in implementing the scheme.

Our commitment to the development of wellbeing, strong personal values, self -awareness, and emotional resilience is reflected through discrete teaching and learning opportunities across the curriculum, and through the ongoing delivery of the core and foundation subjects.

The aims of our curriculum are:

To provide an engaging curriculum that is underpinned by the teaching of core skills and knowledge to ensure that our pupils become confident and effective speakers, readers, writers and mathematicians.
To teach using a cross-curricular topic approach whilst ensuring that the integrity of each subject is preserved and celebrated. We want our children to believe that they can become scientists, artists, historians or engineers.
To fulfil the requirements of the National Curriculum (example of curriculum compliance doc) by ensuring broad, balanced and differentiated provision and the progressive development of concepts, knowledge and skills; and for the children to develop a love for every subject.
To engender a notion of aspiration in our children by enabling them to be ready for the next steps in their education and to begin to create a vision for their future learning and life.
To develop our pupils into empathetic, responsible members of society, who know how to make a positive contribution to their community and wider society.
To celebrate with our pupils the history, diversity and cultural wealth of the school’s wider community while also supporting our children’s spiritual, moral, social and cultural development in order to ensure they are well prepared for life in modern Britain.

We pride ourselves in being an aspirational and reflective school; we continually strive to improve our teaching and learning in light of the latest research and ongoing monitoring, evaluation and review. Curriculum documents on our website are updated on an ongoing basis but might not always reflect the very latest changes to provision. Please contact the school if you would like to discuss our most recent work in terms of curriculum development.

If you would like to find out more information about our school curriculum please contact acoole@abbeymead.gloucs.sch.uk

The Curriculum

All children in the school follow the National Curriculum programs of study.

This includes:

Core subjects: Mathematics, English, Science.

Foundation subjects: RE, Computing, Technology, History, Geography, Music, PE, Art and Design, PSHE and SRE.

In Religious Education the school also follows guidelines provided by Gloucestershire Agreed Syllabus We teach children about many faiths and encourage tolerance and understanding of others. Any parent has the right to withdraw their child from Religious Education by stating that they do not wish their child to receive Religious Education instruction from the school.

You can find out more information on individual subjects in the 'curriculum' drop down menu at the top of the page.

Foundation Subject Curriculum

The curriculum at Abbeymead is designed to ensure that provision and outcomes are excellent in both core and foundation subjects. We are very proud of the curriculum we offer and below you find a few examples of curriculum strategies we use to ensure depth of learning in foundation subjects.

Abbeymead Curriculum Concepts and Sticky Learning

An important part of our curriculum development, is ensuring that our provision is crafted to ensure that all children understand and remember more, preparing them for secondary school and future employment. We use a range of strategies across the curriculum to ensure important knowledge and skills are embedded in our children's long term memory.

Across our foundation subjects, and in Science, we have identified key concepts that help our children to make links with prior learning, and learning in other subjects.

We have also identified 'sticky learning', which most simply, is the knowledge and skills we want all children to remember.

“Learning is defined as an alteration in long-term memory. If nothing has been altered in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.” (Kirschner, Sweller and Clarke, 2006)

Abbeymead Concepts

Abbeymead Learning Pathways

Our teachers carefully craft 'Learning Pathways' for each unit of work to ensure it is coherently planned and sequenced, allowing our children to develop sufficient knowledge by the end.

Example of a Y1, Art Learning Pathway