Our Curriculum Implementation

Our high quality plans and resources empower teachers with the subject knowledge they need to feel confident teaching new learning and support teachers’ workload and wellbeing, allowing them to focus more time on their personal pedagogy.

Teachers explicitly teach metacognition in each lesson. They check for children’s prerequisite knowledge and challenge misconceptions at the start. Teachers then encourage children to think about how they can use and apply their existing knowledge and skills to help them be successful in the lesson. Teachers model expert practice before children work independently. At the end of each lesson teachers encourage children to reflect on what they have learned in the session, how it will impact future learning and, would they have approached the task differently.

Retrieval practice is embedded within our curriculum efficiency pathway and into the start of every lesson, enabling children to make links to prior learning, find success through understanding what they already know and how it will help them in the present and ensure that no child is left behind either through mobility or following absences from school.

Individual teachers benefit from coaching, mentoring, networking and CPD to further develop their expertise and support their teaching.

Teacher assessments identify where children are achieving well and how children are progressing through the curriculum from their starting points. Teachers address any gaps by ensuring children receive manageable individual targets where appropriate.

Floorbooks capture children’s personal class learning journeys, their interests, their learning from awareness weeks, their questions, their learning in PSHE, their shared experiences, their work surrounding values, celebrations of trips, visits, visitors and experiences, their personal successes, their voices and their shared identity as a class.

Our Curriculum Impact

Senior leaders work alongside team and subject leaders to measure the impact of our curriculum through a continuous cycle of monitoring. This includes; book looks, lesson visits, learning walks, pupil conversations, teacher conversations, pupil progress meetings, moderation and our teacher assessment which identifies children’s personal targets.

The impact of our curriculum is monitored daily through retrieval practice, ensuring key knowledge is recalled often and applied to different contexts. At the end of each year children also take part in a ‘big quiz of the year’ assessing if they have retained the key knowledge for each subject and supporting future teachers to understand children’s starting points.

Children leave Knowles Primary School having met their potential, gained new knowledge, learnt skills for success in future life and have a strong sense of their own achievements, talents and abilities. Children will understand their moral responsibilities to themselves and others and the lasting place they have in our community.