Pwll Primary School Curriculum Summary

Pwll Primary School is wholeheartedly dedicated to ensuring that the four purposes of Curriculum for Wales underpin our vision and aspirations for our children to enable them to become:

• Ambitious, capable learners
• Enterprising, creative contributors
• Healthy, confident individuals
• Ethical, informed citizens

Our Vision:

At Pwll Primary school we continually strive to improve in everything we do.  Pupils enjoy coming to school to experience a colourful child-led curriculum which inspires learning through imagination and innovation. 

All of our pupils learn to take responsibility for themselves as life-long learners in a safe, nurturing and supportive environment.  A strong inclusive ethos encourages all pupils to develop to their full potential – physically, emotionally, socially, academically and creatively. 

All members of Pwll Primary School community work together with great optimism and belief that all people can achieve great things in life.  Every day we strive to see that our little acorns go on to become magnificent oak trees.

Aims:

• Placing enjoyment and motivation at the heart of our broad, balanced and meaningful curriculum
• Involving pupils in planning innovative and imaginative learning experiences which take account of how children learn best
• Continually developing the environment ensure our pupils continue to thrive - physically, emotionally, socially, academically and creatively
• Creating a nurturing learning environment where pupils have opportunities to discuss feelings and emotions, take risks, learn from mistakes and to grow to understand themselves and those around them
• Developing a whole-school learning community
• Continually developing ways to involve parents and the wider school community in school life
• Being positive and optimistic about the future, and what can be achieved

Development of our new curriculum:

THE FOUR PURPOSES

At Pwll CP School, the four purposes are the starting point and aspiration for the schools’ teaching and learning and curriculum policies. The aim is to support learners to become:

• ambitious, capable learners, ready to learn throughout their lives.
• enterprising, creative contributors, ready to play a full part in life and work.
• ethical, informed citizens of Wales and the world
• healthy, confident individuals, ready to lead fulfilling lives as valued members of society.

STATEMENTS OF WHAT MATTERS

Our curriculum will provide opportunities and experiences to develop the key concepts, knowledge and skills as described in the statements of ‘What Matters’ and in the line with the Statements of What Matters Code. 

CROSS CURRICULAR SKILLS

In addition, the curriculum at Pwll CP School encourages the development of:

Literacy (NLF)

Numeracy (NNF)

Digital Competency (DCF)

… and the wider skills of critical thinking and problem solving, planning and organisation, creativity and innovation and personal effectiveness.

AN INCLUSIVE CURRICULUM

Our curriculum will raise the aspirations of all learners. We have considered how all learners will be supported to realise the four purposes. We have considered our ALN provision, including our ASD specialist classes, and how we will meet the needs of different groups of learners.

LEARNING, PROGRESSION AND ASSESSMENT

Our curriculum will support learning through designing learning opportunities that draw upon the pedagogical principles, which will enable all learners to make meaningful progress over time. Learners will develop and improve their skills and knowledge. Our curriculum focuses on understanding what it means to make progress in a given Area or discipline and how learners should broaden and deepen their knowledge and understanding. It is informed by the Progression Code. This, in turn, supports our approach to assessment, the purpose of which is to inform planning of future learning. Assessment will be embedded as an intrinsic part of learning and teaching. All learners will also be assessed on entry to the school.

AREAS OF LEARNING AND EXPERIENCE

THE STRUCTURE OF THE CURRICULUM IS BASED OF SIX AREAS OF LEARNING AND EXPERIENCE.

• Expressive Arts: Art, dance, drama, film and digital media and music.
• Health and Well-being: Personal and social education, physical education and relationships and sexuality education.
• Humanities: History, religious education and geography
• Language, Literacy and Communication: English and Welsh
• Mathematics and Numeracy
• •Science and Technology: Science, design craft and technology and information communication technology.  

RVE

Religion, Values and ethics (RVE) is a statutory requirement of the Curriculum for Wales and is mandatory for all learners from ages 3-16. There is no parental right to request that a child is withdrawn from RVE in the Curriculum for Wales. As RVE is a locally determined subject, the agreed syllabus specifices what should be taught in RVE within Carmarthenshire.

RSE

Our curriculum embraces the guidance in the RSE code. Our RSE provision will have a positive and empowering role in our learners’ education and will play a vital role in supporting them to realise the four purposes as part of a whole-school approach. Helping learners to form and maintain a range of relationships, all based on mutual trust and respect is the foundation of RSE. These relationships are critical to the development of emotional wellbeing, resilience and empathy.

What this looks like in each part of the school:

Nursery and Reception learners

For pupils at this age, the curriculum is very much play-based.  The Welsh Government has provided guidance on learning at these early stages which show the importance of three key ‘enablers’ in getting the children ready to access further learning successfully.  The three enablers are:

Enabling adults, enabling experiences and enabling environments. 

The curriculum here is centred around adult-child interaction encouraging problem solving, modelling language development and generally building curiosity and scaffolding learning through working side by side with the children at play. It is also important that the children are provided with rich activities and experiences, in a stimulating environment, as contexts for learning to take place naturally, through the child’s motivation and engagement.  Pupils will often work with topics which mirror ‘real life’ – seasons, celebrations, events which are taking place in the world around them and outside school.

Reception Y1/2

As pupils show readiness, often (but not always) through the Reception year, they will transition to some more formal aspects of teaching, through a topic-based curriculum, while retaining the three enablers learning model at other times during the day.  Here they will begin experiencing more structured learning in phonics and mathematics for example, to support their reading and numeracy skill development.  As the children progress through the foundation phase, they will spend more time engaged in focused topic work with the teacher and support staff, as they learn through  working on wider themes and topics to broaden their understanding of the world around them.  Through topic and other learning contexts, they will begin to experience the full range of the Curriculum for Wales Frameworks – in all ‘Areas of Learning and Experience’ – namely:

Expressive Arts; Health and Well-being; Humanities; Languages, Literacy and Communication; Mathematics and Numeracy; Science and Technology. 

Y3-6

The curriculum at Y3-6 is topic based.  Topics are based across the 6 areas listed above.   All teachers, in all classes, plan for development in literacy, numeracy and ICT skills, often through ‘rich tasks’ which drive the learning of other skills in a cross-curricular way. This means that wherever possible, our topic work is literacy, numeracy or ICT based.  This is particularly noticeable as the children move up through the school, where topic material is woven together with literacy and numeracy frameworks, to ensure that as much topic work as possible also serves to consolidate the work carried out in maths lessons, or develops pupil reading, oracy and writing skills.  This means that a strong feature of the curriculum here in Pwll CP School is that it is regularly framed in authentic learning contexts, which makes the learning more meaningful for the pupils. 

We are also continually moving towards a curriculum experience here in Pwll CP School, which includes an increasing amount of time spent outdoors in different learning contexts.  We don’t believe that even older children were meant to do all their learning inside at desks, and believe that the outdoors provides endless rich possibilities for the most authentic of learning experiences for learners of every age.  We also believe that learning outdoors supports the development of good physical and mental health, and aim to keep increasing the percentage of time that learning takes place away from the classroom, for all our learners. 

ATF

The Curriculum for Wales is a curriculum for all.  In order to provide a more useful set of aims, we have changed the wording of some of the core aims for the curriculum for Wales, to bring them closer to the work we do with learners in school.  Aside from that we have been very much as involved in developing a new curriculum in the ATF as we have in mainstream parts of the school. 

As you will know, our learners with autism in the ATF classes can be at very different stages across a range of aspects of development.  So what we are developing in the ATF classes is a curriculum model which aims to move learners through the above mainstream curriculum stages as they move through the ATF classes.  We always work with the pupil from where they are – but in general terms, ATF 1 and most of ATF 2 learners will be working through a highly tailored version of the three enablers approach outlined above under N/R.  Some learners in ATF 2, and most learners at ATF 3 will move onto a more topic-based approach, much like the curriculum from Y1-4, with group work and additional targeted individual skill work. 

In all ATF classes, pupils continue to be fully assessed across all aspects of learning (or pre-learning) skills.  The staff then work to develop contexts in which these skills can be learnt and practiced before being generalised to other settings and with other people. 

All staff are finding developing and refining a new curriculum in Pwll CP School to be challenging work – but incredibly exciting at the same time!

Assessment is a continuous process and takes place on a daily basis. Progression  reference points help learners, teachers, parents and carers to understand if appropriate progress is being made. They set out expectations for learners in each area of their learning, broadly to ages 5, 8, 11, 14 and 16.

Staff and Governors at Pwll Primary School are committed to ensuring a shared understanding of progression amongst all stakeholders.  The school will monitor the impact and effectiveness of its curriculum on a continuous basis throughout the academic year which will feed directly into self-evaluation and improvement processes.