Our Curriculum provides a broad and balanced range of experiences for our pupils.
Our pupils’ background and experiences, our Christian Distinctiveness and climate for learning provides the impetus for our curriculum.
We believe that all children should feel clever and have experience of accomplishment in a wide range of areas. Our curriculum therefore gives an excellent mix of academic and personal development; it recognises the value of paying equal importance to core and foundation subjects; physical wellbeing and mental wellbeing are both valued, understood and prioritised by our careful consideration of curriculum design.
Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, along with a well-planned and structured programme of personal development underpins all of our work and is monitored as closely as the academic subjects.
We carefully balance the requirement of pupils to reach national expectations in core subjects, with our wider curriculum aims of providing a full spectrum of thoughtful and enriching experiences. As much as we value the progress and fulfilment of our pupils academically, we strive to offer them a rich and varied arts curriculum too.
Alongside offering our children a carefully mapped progression of skills with art, DT, PE, music and humanities, we try to enable the children to practice and incorporate these skills across all subjects; giving them the opportunity to express their learning in a variety of ways.
We believe progress is the widening and deepening of essential skills, understanding and behaviours. To ensure this our teaching sequences have spaced repetition to gain a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the matters, skills and processes within subjects.
At Kennington the children in our care are at the heart of everything we do. Every pupil should leave knowing God’s love and be able to show God’s love. We believe that all children are unique and must be celebrated for the special gifts and talents that they possess. Each day we encourage our children to work hard, have a positive mind-set, have the confidence to make mistakes and not give up; in order to achieve celebrate and succeed to feel good about themselves.
Kennington has a curriculum which works with children’s responses and school data to deliver a relevant curriculum, meeting the needs of all children and reflecting the changes in the world, locally and globally.
A curriculum which promotes and develops healthy lifestyles- both physically and mentally.
Spiritual, moral, social and cultural experiences are threaded through everything we do which will facilitate them with all they need to face in the future.
A strong Christian ethos permeating through daily life which gives the children a safe nurturing environment.
Intent
- At Kennington CE Academy we want our children to experience :
- A curriculum that has knowledge and language at the heart of their learning.
- A rich curriculum that enables children to see the world from a wide range of perspectives.
- A curriculum which is underpinned by knowledge and enables the application of skills.
- Opportunities to embed basic skills and demonstrate knowledge in a variety of ways; then moving on with learning.
- Developing resilience, perseverance, challenge and support so they have the confidence to aim high and aspire to more.
- Opportunities to deepen their learning and build on skills progressively each year.
Implementation
At Kennington we plan a cross curricular approach to the curriculum with quality texts to inspire discussion, support the development of reading and provide writing opportunities within each subject. Each term we have a theme week, which allows us to have a more flexible approach to further broaden our approach to the curriculum.
At times, learning will be directed and at times learning will be led by an open ended enquiry approach; with written and practical work embedded.
We use our local community as a valuable resource for the children’s learning, so we thread these links into the curriculum throughout each year group.
Using the outdoors as a classroom is fundamental to our values and this can be school based or as an enrichment activity to other locations.
Maths: Children in all year groups are introduced to new concepts by exploring concrete resources and apparatus before moving on to pictorial representations and questions and then abstract levels of questioning. We aim for a balance of mathematical fluency, reasoning and problem solving in order to ensure that our children are able to apply these classroom skills to everyday life.
English:
Reading: We are dedicated to ensuring that everyone is a reader and they are explicitly taught through a wide range of exciting tasks and texts during guided reading in class. Our Accelerated Read programme; where children are challenged and quizzed, ensures that children are reading for meaning and further develops their ability to retrieve and infer information within the text.
Writing: We are passionate about our writing and using KS2 picture books as a vehicle to inspire our writers. Children are given a purposeful stimulus and audience which promotes and encourages creativity. They explore and re-craft their ideas through the re-drafting process, honing their skills with teacher feedback. Finally presenting their finished piece of writing to an audience for review and evaluation.
Throughout the process, spelling, punctuation and grammar weave through the learning, as warm ups, morning learning, spelling lessons and modelled writing. We promote cursive handwriting and children earn a pen licence when they have progressed with their handwriting.
Physical and mental health and well being:
The promotion of understanding and managing children’s emotional health and well-being is threaded
through the week at Kennington.
Collective Worship whole school and class, team building and Godly Play are linked promoting our Core Values. An emotional health and wellbeing section is built into school council meetings, which meet regularly to reflect on what is going well in school to support pupils and develop ideas further.
We aim to respond to how pupils want support for their own social and emotional development through school, each class has a prayer corner which they can access at any time.
We promote healthy life styles through:
- A well designed PE curriculum that leads children to developing excellent skills and competition in a range of local tournaments.
- Peer sports leaders who arrange games during the lunch and break times.
- Daily Collective Worship, Growth mind-set and philosophy sessions gives the children theopportunity to discuss their thoughts and feelings.
- A Nurture facility, Forest School, Play Therapy and Draw and Talk to support children with theiremotions and behaviour.
Subject Leader:
Children from each year group are representatives and role models for each subject.
Each subject has its own particular approach and the applications may be different.
Progress is monitored in all subjects and leaders appreciate that one size does not fit all.
Subject specific skills, resources, activities and knowledge is explained in the long-term plans and is also monitored.
Subject leaders take pride in their areas of leadership.
Musical Enrichment:
Every child is given the opportunity to learn a musical instrument by the time they leave the school. The school offers ukulele, guitar, woodwind and brass instrument tuition.
Children at Kennington participate in performances across the year at Christmas as a performance and choir presentation and year 6 end of year production, all of which are of a high quality.
Key music skills related to the curriculum are delivered through Charanga.
Houses and Dojo points:
At Kennington we place a great importance on improving the children’s learning skills; we teach Growth Mindset and use Bloom’s questioning. Children are rewarded in class with Dojo points for displaying a range of qualities we have identified as the key qualities which will make a successful learner and citizen. We also have Celebration Collective Worship, Headteacher Awards and “Hot Choc” Friday to recognise these qualities.
Advocates are appointed from year 6 to represent the school at various events and Worship Warriors are appointed from across the school to support and lead Collective Worship.
Rewards are given for good manners and helpfulness at lunchtime and the children have a “Star “ table where they have lunch with a staff member.
Impact:
First and foremost we want to instil in our children a love of learning and an understanding that learning is for life; we never stop learning. We want them to feel safe to express and celebrate their learning achievements and recognise their personal and academic growth.
Progress:
English and maths take up the greater part of our timetable. Other subjects are valued just as much, but are timetabled differently, we do recognise that each child is different and that learning takes place over the course of a milestone, a Key stage and the whole primary curriculum.
We know we are successful because of:
Teacher assessment formative and summative:
We use high level questioning dialogue and verbal and written feedback. Informal quizzes, practical tasks, beginning and end of units assessments. The use of I wonder questions for all subjects.
Learner’s voice:
Pupil questionnaires, School Council, Advocates, Buddies. Learning dialogue in the classroom which promotes self evaluation.
Parental involvement:
parent questionnaires, Class Collective Worship, parent, teacher and pupil, Learning Conferences.
Parental Feedback:
Questionnaires, Facebook, letters, productions, Walk in Wednesdays, SLT Surgery, Friends of Kennington and Dojo.
Data Analysis:
Internal with SLT, Subject leaders, pupil progress meetings, Governor monitoring, Schools Partnership Programme, external data (SATs)
Quality Assurance:
Observations, drop ins, book scrutiny, learning walks. Coaching.
Positive Attitude to Learning:
Children engaged and inspired by their learning, posing own enquiry questions, taking initiative, co- constructing the learning pathway.
Respect:
Visibly demonstrated through their school environment, their work, interactions, moral responsibility.
Participating in the community:
Proudly representing their school as School Councillors, Advocates, Worship Warriors, sports tournaments; community events and invited guests.
The impact of what we do and what the children achieve cannot always be measured in data sets and numbers, so we always look holistically at each child. We consider our children as individuals, who are facing challenges. They leave us to attend secondary school ready for the next stage, having enjoyed and embraced their learning experiences along the way.
