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Newbold and Tredington C of E Primary School & Day Nursery

Newbold and Tredington

C of E Primary School and Day Nursery

Creating a chance to SHINE everyday

Foundation Subjects

Curriculum Implementation:

The curriculum is based around the school’s 3 BIG WHAT Questions, intended to provide children with knowledge, experiences and skills through active participation across a variety of subject areas and curriculum enhancements. 

Our curriculum exposes children to meaningful, real life experiences and our flexible timetable across the school allows for children’s creativity and curiosity to guide their learning.

At our school, children acquire knowledge through a curriculum design that is inspired by research into cognitive scientific practices and centred around key texts. We support children to commit knowledge to their long term memory using a combination of spaced learning activities and retrieval practices. By having pupils revisit key concepts, ideas, or skills through our BIG WHAT Questions over longer periods of time, we believe that children have greater opportunities to retain their knowledge. Our BIG WHAT Questions across the academic year are:

  • What does change look like? (Autumn term)
  • What does the world look like to us? (Spring term)
  • What does creativity look like? (Summer term)

To help address the Big What Question, each class has a focused Enquiry Question to guide their learning to more specific elements of the National Curriculum across the foundation subjects. Please see below for the two-year cycle of Enquiry Questions.

Progressive Planning:

Lessons are planned around the skills progression documents available for each subject. These determine the level of skill required for each subject at the end of each key phase across the two-year topic cycle. Teachers use each skill point as a base on which to structure their lessons and use their assessment for learning to differentiate for the different levels of ability.

Assessing Attainment:

At the end of each term, children are posed enquiry-based investigations which focus on the BIG WHAT question for their topic. They use their knowledge gained from in-class enquiries, drawing together the skills that they have developed across the term to develop their initial enquiry map. Teachers use evidence collected from assessment for learning alongside each child’s enquiry map to determine how successfully each skill objective has been achieved.