Emneth Academy Curriculum Intent

We hope you enjoy perusing our Curriculum pages, with lots of information! If you have any further questions, please contact Mr Bazeley-Smith, our Curriculum Leader, in the first instance.

Curriculum Leader: Andy Bazeley-Smith (andy.bazeley-smith@ema.eastern-mat.co.uk)

Intent

Our curriculum is designed to reflect our vision of all children fulfilling their potential by discovering a love of learning, while being provided with chances to broaden their outlooks. Our curriculum is carefully planned to ensure that children’s learning is centered around age appropriate knowledge; we take this approach in all subjects. Throughout everything, the learning of fundamental British Values and opportunities to develop wider understanding of the modern world are threaded through the curriculum, through our value based learning.

Our curriculum also closely links to the local demographic, incorporating local history and geographical features. Our aim is to provide the children of Emneth Academy knowledge of the local area, learn and gain insight into local businesses and opportunities as well as exploring the wider world, thus raising aspirations for their future.

Implementation

Through focussing learning on a series of diverse units, key curriculum requirements can be embedded to motivate pupils to develop a growth mind-set, enabling them to continue learning outside the classroom. Linking learning to local, national and international themes develops tolerance in accepting different opinions, while raising personal aspirations and expectations. Incorporating a diverse range of new opportunities through our *Top 20! programme provides pupils with greater self-esteem to empower a brighter future. Through diversifying learning opportunities, we offer an enjoyable learning environment and teach children the importance of hard work being a vital personal quality to achieve goals.

Through our curriculum rationale, we embed our key values:

Expectation

Motivation

New Opportunities

Enjoyment

Tolerance

Hard Work

The curriculum

The curriculum that we have designed at Emneth Academy is ambitious and provides a challenge for our pupils. We follow the National Curriculum, which guides long term and medium term planning, and use various schemes to supplement our curriculum. We use and adpat the Primary Knowledge Curriculum (PKC) for Art & Design, Design Technology, Science, Geography and History. Children learn how to write and phonics is taught following Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. Since November 2021, we have fostered the Jane Considine approach to Writing across the whole school, which focuses heavily on sentence composition and vocabulary development with grammar interwoven into it. Reading is discretely taught as an extension to Little Wandle using Collins Big Cat resources.

Structure

Our curriculum is organised so that learning builds year on year, providing a ‘spiralling’ curriculum where children are taught key knowledge, significant skills and relevant vocabulary which will broaden their knowledge and enrich their learning experiences. Bruner (1961) states that the purpose of education is not to impart knowledge, but instead to facilitate a child's thinking and problem-solving skills which can then be transferred to a range of situations. At the start of each new unit, knowledge organisers are created for children and parents; these outline key facts and vocabulary which can be used as an introduction to each new topic and a point of reference enabling parents to support their child’s learning experience. These are shared with parents and are also be available on the school’s website.

Impact

At Emneth Academy we ensure that the children are regularly assessed against the relevant frameworks across the breadth of the curriculum. There is a regular half-termly cycle of monitoring and assessment which is analysed and utilised for identifying knowledge gaps, following this the teachers meet with members of the leadership team to discuss each pupil’s progress to find out the reasons behind their current attainment enabling the school to provide interventions and any necessary support.

Enrichment

The Emneth Academy the enrichment programme is designed to move our curriculum to outstanding. It provides every child with the opportunity to participate in twenty experiences which they will remember for a lifetime. It has evolved from discussions about the National Trust’s top 50 things to do before you are eleven and three quarters. Each one of the events is designed to push the boundaries of experiences traditionally associated with school