Curriculum Intent and Rationale Introduction

Newhall Infant and Nursery School is a large Infant and Nursery school located in a small village in South Derbyshire between Swadlincote and Burton on Trent. It is at the heart of the community with children happy and eager to come to school. The school building is relatively modern with bright and airy classrooms each with its own access to outside space. The outside area includes a playground, a wide range of outdoor equipment and small wildlife areas. A number of our children come from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

Intent

Within the caring and nurturing environment we provide, we aim to offer pupils a curriculum that is relevant, meaningful, exciting and empowers them to become confident, well-rounded individuals with high aspirations. Our ‘Learning Means the World ‘curriculum provides a range of learning opportunities for our pupils to be able to demonstrate a positive mental attitude, to be able to work collaboratively and communicate with confidence and effectiveness. We aim to offer high-quality teaching and learning for all our pupils that highlight the importance of being open to new or different ideas or cultures. Through these experiences, we aim to develop our pupils to become educated citizens within our own community and, on a wider national and global scale.

Our curriculum will build knowledge and skills throughout each key stage, building up the content of long term memory. Children will revisit familiar themes and retrieve prior knowledge, with new learning introduced in relation to what children already know. Although the curriculum will be delivered in innovative ways, the focus will be on memory, not memories.

With this in mind, we have implemented a relevant, exciting, cohesive curriculum model that enables pupils’ learning to connect with the wider world and to progress, year on year.

Rationale for Implementation

We use Dimensions ‘Learning Means the World’ Curriculum as the main vehicle for achieving our outlined intent. As a school with mixed age classes, the curriculum has been planned over a 2 year cycle.

This curriculum is underpinned by four highly relevant world issues, known as the four Cs:-

Communication

Culture

Conservation

Conflict

The four C’s will be revisited by the children each year from Nursery up to Year 2

Communication

 We believe communication is at the very centre of success in life as we all need    

 communication skills to access the wider world. We understand that if we want our pupils to   

 be aspirational, they will need to be able to communicate effectively. We want them to

 develop the skills to enable them to meet with people, form relationships, solve problems,  

 work through difficult situations and celebrate successes. When our pupils leave school,  

 we want them to be able to progress well in life, communicate their needs and wants

 effectively, and resolve conflicts through positive communication. With the increasing

 influence of digital devices and screen time we recognise this could have a negative

 impact on language development. Our ‘Learning Means the World’ curriculum has been

 designed to compensate for this by providing a variety of learning experience involving

 face-to-face communication developing vocabulary, sentence structure, speech and

 confidence.

Culture

The majority of our school’s intake at Newhall Infant and Nursery School is White British, reflecting the demographic of the local community. There are limited opportunities for some of our pupils to experience a wider range of cultures and backgrounds different to their own. We believe that it is vital to help our pupils recognise and understand the diversity beyond our village. In addition to being proud of their own culture, we want our pupils to embrace, respect and celebrate the beliefs and traditions of different groups in society locally, nationally and globally. This includes providing experiences that help our pupils understand that culture means more than race or religious differences. Our ‘Learning Means the World’ curriculum is outward-facing and centres on opening minds to these many differences including food, buildings and traditions.

We also want to further develop the culture of the school, building a place of mutual respect where positive relationships are nurtured and developed between everyone. We want to promote a culture of ambition and opportunity, helping our children to flourish as confident learners.

Conservation

Newhall Infant and Nursery School is proud to be an Eco School, and our pupils are beginning to develop a sense of stewardship and learning about sustainability through recycling, litter picks and planting. We need pupils to deepen this understanding so that they can see that all their actions will have consequences both positive and negative.

We are proud of our conservation areas within the school grounds, including our class gardens, wildlife areas and bug house. Our curriculum will bring these outdoor areas into our pupil’s everyday experiences and enhance their learning opportunities. We believe in modelling and helping our children see how our actions have consequences and encourage them to be ambassadors for change in the community and at home too.

Conflict

The pupils of Newhall Infant and Nursery School are eager to behave well and always try their best. However, conflict is an everyday occurrence in a range of settings, whether it be an argument at home or a fallout on the school playground. We believe we should help all children to understand conflict and not be afraid to talk about it. They need to learn how to develop resilience and independence when managing conflict. We want our pupils to not only be able to communicate what has happened but also to have the ability to listen and put it into context. We believe that effective, positive communication is essential when resolving conflict. We will empower out children to be brave enough to disagree or have a different opinions from others, realising that conflict can be a positive thing, leading to learning. In the wider context, we will encourage our pupils to think more globally and make connections between conflicts and the periods of time they have learned about - why those conflicts occurred and what happened next. It is important for our pupils to recognise conflict still exists today and to teach them that if they do meet people from conflict areas or refugees, they communicate with them sensitively and with compassion.

Our curriculum narrative begins with Communication, as we believe it is the core of all our learning at Newhall Infant and Nursery School. We know the importance of providing opportunities for our pupils to develop secure speaking and listening skills to enable them to engage with each other and in their learning. It will also help our pupils focus on different ways to communicate their learning in class and to different audiences. Through more effective communication we can build community, therefore our next theme focuses on Culture. We know that by listening and talking we can find out about the similarities and differences between ourselves and others. We want our pupils to embrace these similarities and differences and appreciate the richness of a diverse society. Our theme narrative moves from respecting others to respecting and taking responsibility for our actions through our next-world theme of Conservation. By exploring our world through a range of experiences, our pupils will have a deeper understanding of their direct actions and develop a greater responsibility. Finally, through a broader understanding of communication, culture and conservation our pupils will learn about Conflict. How a lack of understanding and poor communication skills can lead to conflict. Through our ‘Learning Means the World’ curriculum we aim to teach our pupils about conflict in both the past and present and look at some of the reasons how and why conflict has changed over time. We then want our pupils to understand how conflicts can be solved and peace achieved, especially on a personal level.