Lovers’ Lane Enquiry Curriculum
At Lovers’ Lane Primary and Nursery School, the purpose of our curriculum is to provide our children with a broad and balanced education that allows them to develop their knowledge and skills within specific subject areas in line with our school values. We want the best life opportunities and experiences for every child in our care, so we work hard to instill our core SWAN values which are to ‘Show respect, Work together, Aspire and Nurture’ in all we do. These values underpin our ethos and the family feel in our school.
The content of our curriculum should meet the needs of all students. To do this, we have carefully planned the knowledge, skills, values and attitudes that we feel are important for our students to develop through our curriculum design. For each subject, the subject leaders and headteacher have worked carefully to ensure that conceptual knowledge, skills and factual knowledge are balanced across each subject area. Our curriculum also provides opportunities for our pupils to develop their understanding of the world, other people, cultures, customs and beliefs. Pupils also have life skills learning planned carefully into our curriculum offer to ensure that they benefit from progressive personal development which is carefully sequenced to build on prior knowledge across the age range.
Our curriculum offer is enriched with a carefully planned extra-curricular offer. Educational visits, clubs, themed learning days and house days provide opportunities for pupils to flourish artistically, in sport, in understanding the environment and ways to relax and unwind. Extracurricular opportunities are linked to curriculum learning to make learning exciting, hands on and memorable and can be linked to any curriculum area. Examples of such include: Art week; British Values afternoons or house days; Science Week; Design and Technology Days; Reading Week; entry into local sporting events and town/ district level competition; Canal Trust Water Safety educational workshops in the community; DARE; The Great Project (Healthy Relationship Education); First Aid learning with local providers and much more. We also use visitors to come to school to enrich our curriculum offer, such Stone Age Workshops and ‘Hate not Hope’.
Our curriculum is taught in separate subjects (a knowledge-centred curriculum). The sequencing of the content has been organised with careful consideration to ensure that knowledge and skills are built upon as the curriculum progresses through phases. Thinking very carefully about what will be learnt, when and why has helped us to ensure coherence and consistency across the curriculum.
Our curriculum progression maps and medium term planning sequences have been planned in conjunction between the subject leaders and the headteacher. Potential community support and external providers or community/ enrichment opportunties have also been considered and factored into the curriculum at our school, for example, links with the local Civil War Museum, Canal Trust, local businesses and significant places which we are lucky to have in our town, such as Newark Castle. We also work with families and the wider community to enrich the curriculum, including grandparents sharing old toys from their childhood, nurses, vets and local first aid groups for example.
Throughout the school year our curriculum will continue to be evaluated and improved as needed. Subject leaders will conduct monitoring and evaluation activities, such as looking at pupil books, visiting and observing lessons, talking with the children about their learning and also analysing pupil data. Audits of planning against books and pupil responses and achievements will also give us a good picture of the impact our curriculum is having on improving pupil learning and how well their learning is being committed to long term memory. We have identified key information that is especially important for the children to remember and have created knowledge organisers which support this. Regular ongoing assessment during lessons through questioning, quizzes, short tasks, discussion etc will also inform us on the impact the teaching and learning of our curriculum is in it’s implementation. Senior leaders and governors monitor the impact of this as an overview and leaders at all levels use this information to continually improve our provision for the children. Subject leaders and Senior leaders monitor and evaluate our curriculum offer termly. This work is quality assured by our governing body.
If you have any questions about the curriculum at Lovers’ Lane and what we teach, please contact the school directly.