Curriculum Overview

Statement of Intent

The breadth of our curriculum is designed with three goals in mind:

1. To give children appropriate experiences to develop as confident, responsible citizens.
2. To provide a rich ‘cultural capital’.
3. To provide a coherent, structured, academic curriculum that leads to sustained mastery for all and opportunities for greater depth of understanding.

Curriculum Drivers (as easy as A, O, C, D):

We have developed four drivers that shape our curriculum, bring about the aims and values of our school and respond to the particular needs of our community.

Cultural Capital and Experiences:

Cultural capital is the background knowledge of the world children need to infer meaning from what they read and experience. It is the currency for social mobility and the acquisition of this will allow children to transcend their economic-given status whilst repairing divisions in society caused by gaps in knowledge. Specifically, cultural capital is powerful knowledge. It includes vocabulary which, in turn, helps children to express themselves in a sophisticated, mature way. At Horton Kirby CofE Primary School, the way in which cultural capital is acquired and developed is multi-faceted. We give children access to carefully considered areas of knowledge through our breadth of curriculum design. Children are able to develop their knowledge of many topics. Additional experiences that are provided also play a part in the development of each and every one of our child’s procurement of cultural capital and further opportunities continue to be reviewed, enhanced and added.

Statement of Implementation

Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it:

1. Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
2. Interleaving helps children to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
3. Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.

In addition to the three principles, we also understand that learning can be invisible in the short term and that sustained mastery takes time.

The school’s curriculum content is based upon the principles of the “Essential Curriculum” model. This involves the children being immersed in a curriculum that is coherent, progressive and appropriately sequenced to enable our children to develop subject-specific knowledge and skills to prepare them well for the next stages of their education.

The curriculum builds progressively from learning in the Foundation Stage. The ‘Big Ideas’, ‘Aspects’ and ‘Milestones’ (EYFS, 1, 2 and 3) that are linked and built into our curriculum, allow the children to embed their procedural knowledge. These milestones are aligned with the National Curriculum and indeed go beyond the National Curriculum requirements. We have mapped out the procedural knowledge for each subject across a 2-year cycle for each milestone (other than EYFS). Choosing this approach enables our children to develop meaningful links and opens their eyes to a world beyond their immediate locality. It also builds their cultural capital, preparing them with essential knowledge for their future success. Planning in this way ensures all children have access to a full curriculum which progresses across the year – we know that during each milestone every indicator is covered multiple times, so children have the chance to work at a Basic, Advancing and Deep level which inform teacher assessments.

The curriculum implementation emphasises the importance of developing the depth of children’s learning. In essence, this means providing children with an increased cognitive challenge, allowing them to apply the skills which they have learnt independently in a range of contexts rather than moving them on to the next skill needlessly when they have not truly mastered it.

Statement of Impact

Big Ideas

At Horton Kirby CE Primary School, we link ten ‘Big Ideas’ to all of the children’s learning to ensure that as a school we are embedding learning as children move through the school.​

Using ‘Big Ideas’ across our broad and balanced curriculum will help to deepen children’s understanding of concepts across a range of subjects and themes.​

Furthermore, it will also develop and deepen children’s understanding of ‘The Wider World’ – this is something that we believe is vitally important for children at Horton Kirby CE Primary School. 

Because the ‘Big Idea’ themes are repeated in each year group across all curriculum subjects, it is important the students progress in their understanding of them.  ​

​The curriculum at Horton Kirby sets out this progression in the form of four ‘Milestones’.  Each Milestone contains a range of descriptors which give more detail to be discovered within the concept.  ​​

Over a two year period (phase), students will become more and more familiar with these details by exploring them in a breadth of contexts – not only giving a deeper understanding of subjects but also a deeper learning about the world around them.  ​

These descriptors are not exhaustive and should only be used as a guide for teachers. They should not be ‘ticked off’ as each one is covered: they should be repeated in as many different contexts as possible to embed learning and long term memory.

If you require any further information about our curriculum, please do not hesitate to contact the school office who will put you in contact with the relevant subject leader.

Curriculum Overview Downloads