Curriculum Implementation: How do we achieve our vision?

How we implement our curriculum design

At St John the Evangelist CE Primary School, we have used the EYFS Statutory Framework and the National Curriculum, to create whole school subject overviews to ensure an age-appropriate progression of knowledge and skills for core and foundation subjects. This has been carefully mapped out for each subject and year group showing how key content is sequenced progressively towards defined end points.

To ensure the defined precise knowledge and skills are coherently and sequentially taught within each subject and year group, we have designed learning journeys for each of the core and foundation subjects which teachers use as the basis for their planning

Knowledge underpins and enables the application of skills. We strive for children to learn new skills alongside knowledge, ensuring that both are explicitly developed. Within each learning journey we have identified the precise substantive and disciplinary knowledge to be learned. We understand that there is more to a subject than the information, facts and concepts that are taught and learned. These things are substantive knowledge. Disciplinary knowledge focuses on what it is that historians, geographers, scientists, language speakers or programmers do to preserve the discipline in each subject and make it about more than substantive knowledge. This ensures that our children are supported not just to ‘know and remember’ but also ‘to do.’

Subject leaders have identified substantive and disciplinary knowledge in each subject, so that children have the opportunity to consolidate and build upon prior knowledge with new learning, supporting retention and recall throughout their journey through primary school.

We teach subjects discretely so that children gain a better understanding of each subject discipline, however we take a cross-curricular approach where appropriate to maximise links across subjects and to ensure teaching and learning is relevant and meaningful.

Using research to inform teaching and learning

At St John the Evangelist CE Primary School, we continually review our pedagogical approaches based on the findings of research. We have developed the St John’s essentials for teaching and learning using recommendations from the following:

• Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction
• Gradual Release of Responsibility Model
• EEF Five-a day Approach

Cognitive science tells us that learning builds on what children already know and therefore children are more likely to remember new knowledge when it can be integrated with what they currently know – the development of schema. Knowledge needs to be rehearsed and retrieved in order to prevent it being lost from long term memory. Each time knowledge is retrieved our long-term memories are strengthened, reshaped and adapted.

Both formative and summative assessments are used throughout all learning journeys, to ensure that children are knowing and remembering more over time. At St John's, we use a range of assessment for learning tools and retrieval practices to gain this insight. These are used alongside Solo Taxonomy (Biggs and Collis 1982), a model that describes levels of increasing complexity in students’ thinking and understanding. These strategies have been incorporated into all subject learning journeys and are adapted for all Key Stages from EYFS to KS2. Additionally, summative assessments take place at the end of each long term to support teacher judgements and future planning