At Ellison Primary Academy we provide children with an ambitious, high quality curriculum that allows them to develop and deepen their knowledge and understanding as they make meaningful connections. We do this by carefully planning what we teach; selecting meaningful contexts and ensuring the concepts within each subject discipline progress and expand over time. We encourage children to become independent, resilient learners who relish a challenge.
Thinking skills are taught across the school through our Philosophy for Children (P4C) sessions; encouraging our children to be caring, collaborative, critical and creative thinkers.
We recognise that oracy is a powerful tool for learning; by teaching children to become more effective speakers and listeners we empower them to better understand themselves, each other and the world around them. It is also a route to social mobility, empowering all children, not just some, to find their voice to succeed in school and life.
We promote a love of reading with carefully selected, progressive high-quality texts chosen to enhance learning across the curriculum. Our love of reading is compounded by being a Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) Associate school with children from our Reception classes to Year 6 reading, understanding and performing Shakespeare’s’ plays.
Our curriculum is planned to promote cultural capital for all our children, particularly the most disadvantaged. Subjects are planned carefully to ensure the essential knowledge that children need to prepare them for their future success is learnt. We strive to give children the best possible start to their early education and use the curriculum to enhance the experience and opportunities available to them through their knowledge, skills and behaviours. We consider carefully how our curriculum will address social disadvantage by addressing gaps in pupils’ knowledge and skills.
We have ensured that the subject curriculum contains content that has been identified as most useful, and ensured that this content is taught in a logical progression, systematically and explicitly enough for all pupils to acquire the intended knowledge and skills required to succeed beyond their journey at Ellison.
Our curriculum aims to: | Why is this important in our setting? |
Be purposeful, enjoyable and celebrated | Children need to love learning; to see the value in what they do and know that others do too; their learning has an impact on generations to come. |
Encourage curiosity and engagement | To support enquiring minds and empower pupils to participate in a journey of self-discovery. |
Meet the diverse needs of our children and our community | So that children know that everyone matters and belongs. We enable all children to progress and enrich communities with confidence and courage. |
Promote Collaboration | Children need to respect each other; to be sociable and responsible citizens. |
Inspire collaborative, creative, critical and caring thinking | To create a community of enquiry that develops children’s questioning and reasoning skills; improving their search for alternative perspectives and connections; improving their critical thinking so that they are open to changing viewpoints. |
Instill knowledge, skills and understanding | Our curriculum enables learners to see links between aspects of learning within and across subjects and curriculum areas. It prepares them for the next stage in their learning. |
Generate confident communicators | Children need to develop a broad vocabulary and full repertoire of talk skills allowing them to express ideas clearly and confidently to a range of audiences. |
Have characteristics of effective learning | So that children are supported and know how to learn and thrive in a changing world. |
Be ambitious for all learners | To inspire and challenge learners to achieve the very best, and be the best they can be. |