Intent

At Bournes Green Infant School our aim is to develop a lifelong love of learning. Our curriculum is designed to promote mastery and a depth of understanding. It prepares pupils for life beyond and after school through our focus on mastery and The Learning Powers. We model, encourage and reward children for displaying the powers of curiosity, perseverance, imagination, improvement, enthusiasm, concentration, cooperation and effort. Our Learning Powers are woven throughout our curriculum. We focus on the enjoyment and journey of learning rather than just the outcome.

Implementation

Our curriculum is based on the National Curriculum. It is coherently planned and sequenced towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning. Our curriculum is subject-driven thought does exploit links between subjects when they occur. Our curriculum is designed to reflect the local area, the community we serve and the needs of the children. Where possible, our curriculum ensures that links are made to reading and writing; opportunities to link learning to other subjects is capitalised on. We place a high emphasis on ensuring that our children develop a firm and secure knowledge and understanding of the basic skills of reading, writing and maths. We strongly believe that having a wide and varied vocabulary is fundamentally important and therefore we ensure that vocabulary development is planned, taught and applied accurately. These skills are essential in ensuring that our children have firm foundations which are built upon and embedded throughout the Bournes Green journey. We use the Collins Big Cat Phonics for Letters and Sounds reading scheme to ensure that reading books are closely aligned to the children’s phonic knowledge.  Alongside their scheme book the children are encouraged to experience a range of genres and texts and develop a love of reading. Our phonics teaching is based on the New Revised Little Wandle Letters and Sounds which is a systematic synthetic phonics programme. The scheme is adapted to ensure it meets the needs of all learners. Our children have a wide range of memorable and fun learning experiences. We want learning to be magical and this evident in our unique and immersive library. Our curriculum is enhanced with experiences beyond the National Curriculum with the inclusion of outdoor learning sessions, swimming lessons, enrichment activities, educational visits and opportunities to attend extra-curricular clubs.

Learning occurs when a change happens in long-term memory. Successive relearning (the combination of both spacing and retrieval practice) allows children not only to maintain their ability to successfully apply their knowledge, but also to get a better understanding of the bigger picture. For this reason, reviewing previous learning and spaced repetition are built into our curriculum: children learn knowledge in the first instance and then revisit this learning on a later occasion, securing and applying their knowledge.

Impact

Our children leave the Infant School well-prepared for the next stage of their education. They have a good academic knowledge and have developed the knowledge and skills to enable them to be successful learners. Our children have a thirst for learning and take pride in their achievements. They have a good understanding of how to make a positive contribution to the school community and have an age appropriate understanding of what it means to be a good citizen.

British Values

At Bournes Green Infant School, we think it is very important that our pupils develop a strong set of values and principles, and that they question and understand what it means to grow up in British society.

Through a rich and challenging curriculum, and a focus on key events in British history, we invite pupils to reflect upon their role in a diverse, multicultural and multi-faith society.

Through assemblies, discussions and discrete lessons regarding Fundamental British Values, we equip pupils with a mature, respectful and sensitive appreciation for difference and diversity. In discussing what it means to be British, children engage critically with stereotypes and prejudices and develop an understanding of how we can celebrate our heritage and home cultures whilst also embracing the ties that bind us together. We further instil an appreciation of the values of fairness and democracy through our school council.

We deliver an inclusive Religious Education curriculum that teaches pupils about the beliefs and practices of major religious groups, and the shared values that religion can promote in synchrony with core British values.

As a school, we take our responsibility to generate respect for differences and individual rights seriously. Our challenging curriculum enables pupils to recognise the valuable role that they play as emerging citizens in British society.