Curriculum Intent

The SASF Curriculum

INTENT

The intent of our researched-based curriculum is to plan and deliver a curriculum that is accessible to all, while maximising every child’s academic achievement and increasing their cultural capital.

Design

The SAS curriculum is designed with the following concepts at its core:

• Learning – a change in the long-term memory
• Progress – pupils knowing more and remembering more
• Automaticity – the automatic recall of key, sticky knowledge identified in each year group and in each subject
• Cultural Capital – the currency to enable social mobility (language acquisition, vocabulary size, reading, music art etc.)
• Working Memory - a mental work space to manipulate data

Cultural Capital

• To meet the specific contextual needs of our pupils, there is a deliberate focus on oracy/vocabulary to ensure children develop rich prototypes and schemas. This enables children to make connections and transfer knowledge to infer meaning.
• The deliberate design of our curriculum ensures pupils are given the opportunity to build on their cultural capital and therefore increase social mobility. The SASF reading spine systematically develops to ensure all pupils are exposed to a wide range of genres and authors, ensuring diversity.
• Research evidences that vocabulary and language skills have the greatest impact on social mobility. As a result, we are building a curriculum that identifies the key vocabulary in each subject, which children must understand by the end of each topic to support future learning. 
• British values, current affairs and Christian values are celebrated weekly in collective worship. The aim of this is to deepen children’s understanding of their role within the global community and the impact it can have on their day-to-day lives.
• We run a half-termly Oracy competition that develop children’s research, speaking and presentational skills whilst also exposing them to culturally significant topics in order to increase their cultural capital and enable social mobility.
• We are increasing the number of educational trips and visits as well as visitors into school, to increase opportunities beyond their life experiences.

Structure and Sequencing

• Each subject has a clearly sequenced and progressive set of key (sticky) knowledge that all pupils must learn by the end of each year, to build on during future learning. This specific knowledge is the focus of each lesson's intent and implementation. The curriculum design allows multiple opportunities for children to rehearse and recall previous learning, so that they, ‘know more, remember more.’   
• Children are given the opportunity to study a broad range of subjects, each of which has a progression map from EYFS-Year 6, within a 3D curriculum.
• High aspirations are set for all SEND pupils and they are supported to be able to access the curriculum - our intent for learning is ‘all knowing all.’ 
• So that children practise their decoding skills at home, every child is sent home with a phonetically appropriate book in KS1, and EYFS when appropriate. This continues into Key Stage 2, where children are issued with a book according to their reading attainment level (PM benchmarking). In addition to this, all children are challenged and extended through the choice of high-quality, diverse class texts and story time texts, which they are supported to access. Moreover, the love of reading is encouraged through the loaning of high-quality, engaging texts from the school library and the local library too.
• During the last academic year, we transitioned from a Project Based Learning (PBL) approach of teaching the foundation subjects to discrete subjects. This strategic decision was taken so that there was a deliberately sequenced and progressive curriculum, which enabled children to learn and build upon the key knowledge in each subject.