sheringham's curriculum statement
Summary
The Sheringham Curriculum has been carefully designed to ensure all our children receive a rich curriculum that ignites curiosity, fascination and aspiration and equips them for the next stages of their education. Children’s learning across the curriculum is enhanced with meaningful experiences that bring it to life, including WOW immersions, educational visits and purposeful ‘outcome’ celebrations, with subjects taught discretely to ensure knowledge, skills and understanding in individual subjects are developed successfully. A continual commitment to children’s social, moral, spiritual and cultural learning runs through both the taught and wider curriculum. Our relentless drive to develop children’s mathematical and reading skills, as well as their spoken and written communication, also informs how we teach across the curriculum; we believe children need as many meaningful opportunities as possible to truly master these fundamental skills.
Principles behind The Sheringham Curriculum
Ensuring equity
We pride ourselves on an ambitious, enriched curriculum offer, which is designed to give all children, regardless of background, the experiences required to both deepen their understanding of the world and build the cultural capital essential to thrive within it. We strive to inspire children and ignite their aspirations, by exposing them to a wide range of role models, reflective of our community and modern Britain, and taking them beyond their lived experience through educational visits, inter-school competitions and clubs. All children, including those with SEND, are given the very best start to their education, with targeted support, intervention and specialist teaching utilised to support children in overcoming any barriers to learning they may face.
Understanding context and celebrating community
We understand that many in our community face challenges including deprivation, over-crowded homes and a lack of access to services and opportunities; we know how important it is that our school strives to help children to be happy and healthy. We also recognise the rich diversity of culture and experience within this community, and are committed to ensuring our curriculum reflects and celebrates this both through the topics we teach and the community links we foster.
Developing positive, autonomous learners
We encourage children to take responsibility for their learning and behaviour so that they can become independent, self-motivated and confident. Children develop a ‘growth mindset’ as they realise they can make progress with effort, practice and acting on feedback. They’re encouraged to think creatively and express themselves throughout our curriculum, including in JIGSAW and Philosophy 4 Children sessions, and develop self-awareness and a toolkit of regulation strategies through our learning about the importance of mental health, incorporating the Zones of Regulation.
Striving for balance
We recognise the importance of providing children with time to develop the fundamental skills of literacy, numeracy, communication and collaboration whilst exploring a rich curriculum that supports their developing understanding of the world in which we live. Every area of the curriculum offers children different opportunities to be inspired, enjoy learning new information and develop skills; whilst we don’t teach each subject for an equal amount of time, we value every area for its contribution to children’s development and make sure both children’s enjoyment and their outcomes are strong. Our curriculum design gives opportunities for making links within our learning and to children’s experiences, ensuring that learning is meaningful and knowledge builds effectively over time.
A collaborative approach
Communication and collaboration is at the heart of learning across the whole curriculum at Sheringham, with talk, group-work and collaborative improvement integrated into learning right from the Early Years Foundation Stage to Year 6. Both research and our own observations tell us that children learn best when they’re given the chance to talk through their ideas, share them with others as well as both give and respond to feedback and challenge from peers. A rich receptive and expressive vocabulary, the ability to reason, question and justify, and engage in respectful interactions are just some of the outcomes of this approach and are key behaviours we want our children to leave school with.
Our curriculum map and individual subject areas also provide lots more information on how we learn and what we achieve at Sheringham - please have an explore!
How our curriculum is taught
Our curriculum map has been carefully constructed to ensure children’s knowledge and understanding builds over time. Our individual subjects leaders, including a number of specialists in our school, Trust and local secondary school, provide guidance and support to ensure that progress and outcomes are strong in every subject.
Children are taught individual subjects discretely to ensure they develop skills and knowledge within each subject discipline, understanding what makes a ‘geographer’ or ‘scientist’. We block units together, so that children spent several weeks immersed in a unit and have the time to follow lines of enquiry after developing a core bank of knowledge.
Linking learning to the world around them through visits, workshops and enquiry based on the children’s own interests is vital; children’s fascinations are piqued and interests broadened as they gain knowledge, ask questions and interrogate information they acquire. Children often work collaboratively to explore and problem solve, with challenges that serve to develop resilience, confidence and motivation to excel.
Some subjects are taught by specialists during teachers’ PPA sessions; children participate in music, PE, poetry (for KS1), drama and Spanish (for KS2) sessions that run on a weekly basis for the whole year. This model allows for a genuine depth of learning, supported by expert teaching and high expectations for outcomes.
Units and enrichment experiences are designed to both reflect the diverse, urban context of our school community as well as broaden experiences beyond children’s own lived reality. Finding out about and celebrating London and the local area is a fundamental component of our curriculum, with local history and geography units enhanced by visits to sites of local, national and global significance.
Teachers use their established pedagogy of responsive teaching to ensure they regularly assess children’s understanding, provide feedback and adapt the learning. Learning Journey books capture the learning across a unit, providing ongoing reflection opportunities both within the topic and beyond, as they are utilised to ensure subsequent learning builds on the foundation of what came before.
Every unit of work ends with an ‘outcome’: a planned opportunity for children’s knowledge and understanding to be synthesised, shared and celebrated. Children present to an audience, often parents or another year-group, or make videos, websites or booklets. We are really proud of our children’s amazing outcomes across the curriculum, for example their incredible musical performances; you can explore these in our subject pages and year group sections.
