Curriculum

Halsford Park Curriculum Intent

“Soaring to Success”

At Halsford Park Primary School, our curriculum nurtures the development of the whole child through carefully sequenced learning that builds substantive and disciplinary knowledge over time.

Our ultimate goal is for every learner to grow into a successful, confident individual who soars to success and makes a positive contribution to our school community and to wider society—both now and in the future.

Guided by our Core Values of Responsibility, Respect, Courage and Compassion, we foster an inclusive environment and curriculum that values each child’s academic, social, cultural, spiritual, moral, emotional and physical development. We are committed to ensuring that every child feels represented, supported and equally valued.

We strive to provide an ‘irresistible’ curriculum—one that fully encompasses the National Curriculum and is delivered in a way that challenges pupils, engages their imagination and motivates them to take the next steps in their learning in each subject discipline. Through carefully planned learning sequences and rich personal development experiences, we build resilience, independence and curiosity, encouraging our learners to question and explore the world around them.

Vocabulary Intent

At Halsford Park, we believe that vocabulary and reading are the gateway to learning and are essential for children to access the curriculum. We value the importance of vocabulary and by making it a priority in every lesson, we give all children the opportunity to revisit and explore new vocabulary through talk and reading. We also plan for the explicit teaching of subject specific vocabulary across the curriculum to ensure that learners understand the words they are being exposed to.

We endeavour to:

Increase children’s knowledge of words, their meanings and connections and how they are used.
Develop and deepen children’s understanding of the key subject concepts and knowledge.
Build children’s capacity to speak, read and write like computer analysts, athletes, artists, geographers, historians and musicians that they may one day become.
Enable children to read and comprehend more challenging texts across the curriculum.

The curriculum outlines key vocabulary which increases in complexity each year so that pupils can build upon their prior skills and knowledge.

At the start of each lesson, subject specific words taken from the key vocabulary documents are shared and displayed in the classroom for teachers and learners to refer to and use in lessons.

All pupils are exposed to new vocabulary daily, including those who have SEN and/or disabilities, that are disadvantaged or may have English as an additional Language. Vocabulary lists are adapted where necessary to support learners and programmes such as Communication in Print are used to create visuals to aid their understanding.

Vocabulary is revisited throughout the year to ensure that it becomes embedded and part of the learner’s everyday vocabulary.

Special Educational Needs and Disability (SEND)

We believe that our ‘Irresistible’ curriculum is for all learners. For learners with high level special educational needs, Individual learning Plans (ILP) are created and these outline reasonable adjustments made to ensure equality of access to the curriculum. Please see separate SEND policy for more details:

Implementation

We use the Edison Learning Achievement Statements to teach and assess our Reading, Writing and Mathematics curriculum, as outlined separately.

We plan Science and most of our foundation subjects (Geography, History, Design & Technology, Art) in ‘Learning Experiences,’ utilising the EdisonLearning Connected Curriculum and seek to involve the children and their interests in our plans.

If at any time a subject cannot be meaningfully linked to the learning Experience it is taught discretely- such as Physical Education, which follows the ‘P.E Planning’ scheme and Religious Education which follows the West Sussex agreed syllabus. For in-depth detail on the delivery of the curriculum please see our individual pages, Curriculum policy and Teaching and Learning policy.

In Early Years, all teaching and learning is based around the government non-statutory curriculum guidance ‘Development Matters’ and children work towards achieving the Early Learning Goals in the Prime and Specific areas. Teachers work closely with the children to ascertain and follow their interests, and so adapt the curriculum and learning to their specific needs.

Each Learning Experience takes appropriate objectives from the National Curriculum, broken into key skills acquisition for year groups. Each Experience has a ‘Stunning Start’ to ‘hook’ the children in to their new learning and ends with a purposeful outcome- a ‘Fabulous Finish’. Throughout the Experience, children are encouraged to think about what they are learning, why they are learning it and how they will be able to apply these new skills in a meaningful context. This is underpinned by a rigorous set of foundational skills such as times tables, phonics and handwriting. From recent reading we would consider our curriculum to have a ‘knowledge-engaged’ approach, where knowledge underpins and enables the application of skill and where both are taught explicitly.

Halsford Park is part of the Everychild Partnership Trust. Please see link for the Trust website for further details. https://www.everychildpartnership.org.uk/