Abbeymead Primary School - Our Curriculum

The Abbeymead Ready for Life Curriculum

Governors and staff at the school believe that a key role for primary education is to prepare pupils for a happy and successful later life. This means ensuring that our pupils not only learn core skills in English, Maths and other curriculum subjects effectively, but also develop important ‘skills for life’ such as self-awareness, compassion, teamwork, personal organisation and leadership. Our curriculum is geared to achieving our goal of ensuring that our pupils are ‘Ready for Life’ because the school firstly teaches and embeds the required knowledge and skills at each year group level, and then provides each child with the opportunity to apply what they have been taught in the form of investigate problem-solving scenarios. Wherever possible these are related to the world outside of the classroom.

While we have the highest of expectations for our pupils within the classroom, this is only a part of the learning experience that we offer. We believe in providing a breadth of opportunities for our pupils that will give them the best possible foundations to carry forward into the next stage of their education.

The school offers a broad, balanced and differentiated curriculum covering all areas of the National Curriculum and our aim is to provide a curriculum that meets the needs, interests and abilities of all children.

This curriculum comprises of the core subjects – English, Mathematics and Science and the foundation subjects – Computing (ICT), Design Technology, History, Geography, Art, Music and Physical Education. Personal, Social and Health Education is also taught through our assemblies and creative curriculum. Our curriculum policies specify teaching strategies and set achievement targets for the children. Parents are very welcome to read our policies, and ask for any further clarification.

We do our utmost to maximise success for all children by giving them the best teaching and learning experiences. We use a range of teaching methods to suit the needs of the children and the subjects being taught. The core subjects are taught both stand alone and as part of our creative curriculum in which the foundation subjects are taught as part of a themed termly topic.

An extensive range of extra-curricular activities is provided both during and after school. As well as sports, activities involving music, choirs, languages, science and art are provided by members of the school team, while external experts are engaged to run other clubs as diverse as drama and coding.