Our Curriculum

We have an engaging curriculum that helps all children to succeed in their academic and personal development.

Christopher Hatton School Curriculum

We have developed an outstanding curriculum that helps all children to succeed in their academic and personal development. Through our curriculum and teaching practices, we build the knowledge, skills and cultural capital to enable pupils to become informed, articulate and empowered citizens.

To ensure the most disadvantaged pupils in our school have the best opportunity to thrive academically, our Pupil Premium Strategy focuses on number fluency, reading, vocabulary acquisition and speaking and listening so that all pupils can access the curriculum. Similarly, we closely map out our provision for our SEND pupils, so that they gain the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in life.

Christopher Hatton is a diverse school, we are committed to equality for all and this is reflected in the content of our curriculum, our ethos, and our commitment to anti-racist practices.

We follow these principles when planning our curriculum:

We ensure the content is relevant and coherently planned to ensure knowledge and skills are continuously developed and built upon

We ensure the curriculum is engaging through inspiring resources and delivery

Standards and clarity of progression are at the centre of our curriculum planning and design ensuring the level of challenge and expectation is high in all subject areas.

Pupils are engaged and motivated by a well-planned, stimulating thematic curriculum designed with the following elements:

Informed

• Big Idea – (what is the aim of the learning journey and how does it connect to big world ideas?)
• Knowledge (national curriculum content) structured to build upon and extend prior learning.

Articulate

The promotion of strong oracy skills is a priority for our children, as many enter school with limited vocabulary and practice in speaking. This focus runs throughout our curriculum, because children must be able to talk about what they have learned in a knowledgeable and articulate way.

• Planned opportunities for language development including key vocabulary, sentence stems and discussion points are embedded in all subjects
• Opportunities to discuss, debate, reason and share views, learning and ideas build confidence and deepen understanding.

Empowered

• Values – British and school linked to the Rights of the Child and the Global Goals for Sustainable Development (What kind of person do I want to be? What kind of society do I want? How can I affect change?)
• Reading is the gateway to pupils learning. To ensure all our pupils are able to access the full curriculum, we place a strong focus on early reading and vocabulary development right from the start.
• Skills and characteristics (reasoning, critical curiosity, motivation and resilience)
• Inclusive design to ensure all pupils can access, benefit from and relate to their learning.
• Enrichment (opportunities to bring it to life and make it relevant)

A skills progression from the EYFS Characteristics of Effective Learning to Y6 develops pupils in the following areas: critical curiosity, reasoning and reflection, motivation and resilience. This is planned alongside the development of subject skills and knowledge.

Learning to read is at the heart of accessing the wider curriculum. Reading begins with the systematic teaching of phonics. In addition we teach the wider early strategies of reading and introduce children to quality texts. As decoding skills become more secure and children build fluency, we focus on teaching comprehension skills during daily guided reading session. Through generating questions, we teach children to look at skills such as, retelling, prediction, inference and author’s intentions. We teach them to articulate their own views and to be able to justify them using evidence from the text.

Carefully structured mathematics teaching based on mastery techniques is embedded across the school enabling fluency and rapid progression. We use high quality concrete and pictorial representations to help children explore and demonstrate mathematical ideas enriching their learning experience and deepening their understanding. This concrete – pictorial- abstract approach helps them to cement their knowledge and truly understand what they’ve learnt. Children develop a fluency in basic number facts, mental and written calculation methods. To help develop this fluency we teach number relationships, conceptual understanding, efficient methods and accuracy.

Quality talk, using correct mathematical terminology and full sentences, is also strongly emphasised in the daily maths lessons. This helps develop the children’s reasoning and problem solving skills.

Whole school themes, including a summer term focus on environmental issues engage and empower children providing authentic contexts to apply curriculum knowledge and skills. The environment topics and Earth Summit provide an opportunity to deploy science, technology, English, arts and maths in a cohesive and meaningful way with children using skills effectively to deliver passionate speeches, design environmentally friendly products and meet experts. Children are empowered to make real life changes to school policy and personal behaviours based on their environmental learning. This has included introducing meat free Monday, replacing milk cartons with reusable glass bottles, designing reusable water bottles.

Flexibility in content and timings and the blocking of some subjects allow teachers to meet the needs and interests of pupils and provides opportunities for extended reading and writing and application of mathematical skills.

Specialist teaching in computing, PE and Music, and use of individual teacher skills enables us to utilise staff expertise to raise the quality of teaching and learning across the curriculum.

Conscious of the importance of broadening our pupils life experiences, opportunities for cultural development are extensive and supported through the schools ‘Entitlement pledge’ all children attend frequent trips to broaden their knowledge and cultural appreciation.

Resources such as White rose maths books reduce unnecessary workload enabling teachers to focus on high quality lesson design, interaction and effective questioning.

Impact of the curriculum

We constantly review our curriculum through regular subject reviews to ensure sequential, layered knowledge acquisition and check that pupil outcomes are of a very high quality.

Children love to share what they know and what they can do. They make very good progress as evidenced by our pupil achievement data year on year, the work in their books and their attitude to learning.