The Petteril Bank Curriculum
Intent
At Petteril Bank Community School, we want our pupils to feel valued, confident, happy and ready to take the next steps into their education and lives beyond primary school regardless of their starting point. We celebrate our difference.
Our aim is for every child to succeed by experiencing an exciting and enriched curriculum delivered by a team of dynamic, enthusiastic staff, supported by parents and governors in a nurturing environment.
The Petteril Bank Curriculum has been designed for our children in a way that provides rich opportunities for learning about our beautiful home county of Cumbria as well as our place in multi-cultural Britain and the wider world, underpinned by the knowledge, skills and understanding relevant for each year group.
Our curriculum will promote and foster confidence, independence, co-operation and self-esteem throughout the time the children are at Petteril Bank Community School, which will prepare them for life in 21st Century Britain.
We want all of our children at Petteril Bank to leave with a range of experiences, the self-belief to excel and to understand the feeling of enjoyment.
Our curriculum is carefully crafted so that our children develop their academic, social and cultural capital.
Implementation
The curriculum for each year group is carefully designed to ensure coverage and progression across all subject areas; developing depth of knowledge and understanding together with opportunities for intelligent repetition, which enables children to remember more.
We recognise children’s prior learning, encourage the children to develop interpersonal skills, build resilience and become creative, critical thinkers. Children are supported to achieve their potential and progress with confidence to the next phase of their education.
Our approach to teaching and learning supports our curriculum by ensuring that lessons build on prior learning and provide opportunities for guided and independent practice. The development of children’s knowledge and skills across all primary subjects is key when building on prior learning, this supports pupils for the next stage of their learning.
Everyone at Petteril Bank Community School is encouraged to improve through our curriculum, understand others, not to give up, try new things, work hard, concentrate, excel in many subject areas, to experience real-life contexts and embed these in memorable and magical learning experiences, and to enjoy school life, to enjoy the subjects the children take part in, to develop a thirst for learning and a need to develop their own knowledge and thus become model British citizens of the world with a clear, reflective moral compass and independent skills to apply in the wider world.
Pupils are supported in school with extra support/resources deployed as necessary to help close the individual learning gaps.
Key skills such as evaluation, reflection and investigation are developed across our curriculum. Lessons are planned in such a way that children can apply their knowledge in thinking/problem solving contexts.
In their first year in school, our Reception children follow the Early Years Curriculum and develop their knowledge, skills and understanding through a combination of both play-based learning and more focused teacher led sessions. Pupils learn to explore, develop curiosity, share, work independently and play with others.
In Key Stage One and Two, we do this through the discrete teaching of all subjects, to ensure they are focused on the progression of skills and intellectual progression relevant to each subject. In geography, we teach geography skills to ensure our pupils become good geographers; in history, we teach history skills to ensure our pupils become good historians and so on. In all our subjects, we plan opportunities for intellectual progression and the development of cultural capital through visits, visitors and experiential learning.
Some subjects are taught daily or weekly, such as English, maths, music, RE, PE, computing, whilst others such as science are ‘blocked’ to immerse pupils, allowing for deeper learning and cross-curricular links to be embedded.
Our intention is for our curriculum to prepare our children well for their secondary education and inspire them to find out more about the world and local area around them.
We have a commitment to expanding our pupils’ horizons, whether through learning outside the classroom in our extensive school grounds, working in the local community or through enterprise projects. We see great value in working with visiting speakers, specialists and other professionals.
Impact
As a result of our well planned and implemented curriculum:
- Our children show kindness, compassion, empathy and courage
- Our children demonstrate a passion and thirst for learning
- Our children achieve well – all making good progress from their relative starting points. They will have the knowledge, skills, understanding and vocabulary that empowers them as citizens in the 21st Century
- Our children have high aspirations for the future and know that these can be realised with hard work and determination
- Our children are mentally and emotionally happy and resilient learners
- Our families work in partnership with us to ensure their child’s journey at Petteril Bank Community School is a positive one and prepares them to contribute positively to the world in which they live
Learning will reflect clear curriculum links and intellectual progression and will demonstrate increased engagement and improved performance of pupils across all subjects.
Through the quality of the school’s curriculum, we hope that the children at Petteril Bank Community School will develop curiosity, fascination, meaning and deep learning and a wide range of learning skills and life skills, that will prepare them well for the next phase of education and ultimately the workplace.
The Petteril Bank Promise
We carefully select enrichment activities in order to provide rich experiences to enhance learning for all pupils and have made informed choices about the experiences we want to include and how they build over time across the curriculum. We include both off and on-site experiences in our curriculum and make the most of what we have locally including local businesses and charities. We have developed ‘The Petteril Bank Promise’ to ensure that every child in our school community has a wide range of opportunities to experience and build their cultural capital.
We promise to give you the opportunity to:
- Visit an art gallery
- Visit a museum
- Go to the theatre to see a pantomime
- Go on a residential visit
- Perform in a play
- Climb a fell in the Lake District
- Learn in the outdoors
- Explore & get to know the local area (Carlisle Castle, Hadrian’s Wall, River Petteril)
- Play a musical instrument
- Learn to swim
- Take part in sports competitions
- Plan, prepare and cook a meal for someone
- Try Yoga
- Build dens
- Plant a seed and watch it grow in our school garden
- Go bug hunting and identify bugs
- Meet visitors who will inspire you
