Curriculum
Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom
- Oprah Winfrey
At Hampton Vale, we take great pride in our bespoke Holistic Education Offer that supports our journey to achieve our vision - empowering children to be the best they can be.
In achieving this, we have 5 key strands that underpin our entire educational offer:
- Personal & Social Development;
- Communication & Language;
- Knowledge and Skills;
- Innovation & Creativity;
- Understanding & Appreciating the world.
This wholesome education offer is the following:
- ambitious;
- broad and balanced;
- rooted in high expectations;
- flexible and adaptable;
- and designed to create well-rounded, responsible and respectful educated citizens.
All of our subjects carefully consider our Holistic Education Offer. They are designed to be bespoke, ambitious and innovative to ensure our pupils are taught the necessary knowledge and skills they need to succeed in every subject area. Within our school, we firmly believe that all children must be given the opportunity to thrive and have their individual talents nurtured. This belief permeates the equal value we place on all subjects and is evident within the inspirational provision we provide at our school.
Through our curriculum design, each subject is built and structured with conscious decisions made to map the key knowledge (disciplinary, declarative and procedural) and skills that need to be taught within the area. We break these down into key strands and these act as threads that progress throughout the curriculums. This way, knowledge and skills are coherently sequenced and logically planned which help achieve our Holistic Education offer - children know more, can do more and remember more. In combination with our pedagogical teaching and learning principles, we ensure that all our teachers have a robust curriculum so that they can focus on ensuring their well sequenced lessons are the very best they can be.
Our curriculum has been designed and developed by our own curriculum leaders and is informed by educational research. By doing this we have ensured that our teaching and learning is tailored specifically to our pupils so that we can proactively meet the needs of our locality. The curriculum in each subject area is carefully sequenced so that knowledge and skills are built upon within each year group. Each subject has been planned with the key concepts and strands within each of the disciplines underpinning all the learning.
Learning at Hampton Vale is a tapestry of interwoven strategies and within our curriculum, we also place a strong emphasis on planning for experiences, visitors and educational trips to further enhance our teaching and learning. Our school environment is also a key element within our curriculum design as we have transformed many of our communal spaces to become areas that can be used within our teaching and learning.
For example, in Year 6 when pupils learn about their World at War topic, we have a fully functioning bunker which has been built to give children the experience of what this would have been like for people living through this time period.
In light of our broad and balanced curriculum we have invested in ensuring that Performing Arts, Art, Music, Forest School and P.E specialists teach these areas of the curriculum from Nursery to Year 6. We have a purpose-built performing arts building with a dance and drama studio, art classroom as well as a music room. We also have an outdoor Forest School environment on our school site that consists of three meadow areas and is expertly led by our Forest School leads. In order to enhance our P.E provision we have an outdoor P.E arena, new basketball courts as well as a purpose-built hall within school.
Each of our subjects is organised into each of the main curriculum disciplines:
- Citizenship (PSHE, RE and Forest School)
- Humanities (Geography and History)
- The Arts (Performing Arts, Art, Music)
- Engineering and Technology (Science, Digital Technology and D.T)
- The Core (Writing, Mathematics, Reading, Oracy and Phonics)
Each curriculum discipline and subject area is led by a teacher within school under the guidance and leadership of an Assistant Headteacher with responsibility for curriculum.