Our Curriculum

We have worked hard to design a curriculum that ignites our children’s aspirations and interests and helps them to know more, remember more and do more. Some of our children have limited life experiences in their day to day lives, so we want to give them the knowledge and skills needed to succeed in life and the confidence to follow their interests and passions.

As a small school we felt it was important to establish curriculum teams to work together in order to share resources and ideas. Our curriculum is therefore delivered as a two year rolling programme.

Last year we talked with our staff, children and local community and between us, decided that alongside National Curriculum objectives, we also needed the themes of British Values and Pioneers to run through our curriculum.

• British Values were identified as crucial to ensure these core community and school values are taught across all year groups, so that New Christ Church children understand explicitly their rights and opportunities in today’s Britain. We Are Britain, Great Women, Romans and Conflict are some of the topics where these themes are explicitly taught.
• The theme of pioneers is a vehicle for us to teach our children that they can achieve great things in their lives; we want them to ‘think big’. Examples of pioneers we focus on in our curriculum, include explorers, political activists (suffragettes, Boudicca) and local characters ( Huntley and Palmer, Trooper Potts).

Pride in our community is something we want to instil in our children, so every 2 year roll out of the curriculum has a focus on Reading. We therefore teach history and geography with a local context, thus allowing us to visit nearby areas of historical or geographical interest.

It was important for us to establish a planning framework for our teachers, so every subject was mapped out in detail to clearly identify the knowledge and skills that need to be learnt by the end of each stage of learning. These Progression maps enable us to ensure our curriculum content is age appropriate, aspirational and builds on prior learning.

We have devised Knowledge Organisers for all foundation subjects and Science. These are a summary of key facts and essential knowledge that children need to learn about the unit of work. They help us to check progression across year groups, enable quizzing and recall activities in class, help us to pre-teach children who need more support and help you, our parents, to know what your children are learning and enable you to support them in this learning.