Sutton Curriculum Information
The Sutton Curriculum is rooted in giving pupils a rich experience to enable pupils to hook their knowledge on memorable opportunities and give them an understanding and appreciation of the wider world and the diversities of the world around them.
The curriculum at Sutton provides children with the "Footsteps to their Future"
Curriculum Vision
To provide rich, stimulating, learning opportunities within a broad and balanced curriculum to develop each child's skills, knowledge and creativity so that they fulfil their potential.
We work in partnership with parents and carers in the learning process for the benefit of each child.
Our environment is where the Christian values of love, respect, justice and forgiveness are upheld, experience and shared.
We encourage every child to be a responsible citizen in the local community and beyond.
We are a small school with BIG ideas!
Research
Our aim is for children to leave Sutton-cum-Loud CofE Primary School having acquired a body of substantive and disciplinary knowledge in their long term memory.
Cognitive science tells us that working memory is limited and that cognitive load (capacity to think) is too high if pupils are exposed to too much content too quickly. We will avoid this ‘surface level’ teaching by ensuring that we plan to explore knowledge and concepts repeatedly enabling these to sit in children’s long-term memory.
Sweller et al (2011) pointed out “that if nothing in the long term memory has been altered, nothing has been learned”. It is for this reason that we implement our curriculum in a way that integrates new concepts in a repeated and interlinked way. E.g. in history pupils will develop their understanding of what a significant person is by learning about several significant people over time and making links back to previous significant people that they have studied.
Curriculum Intent
We follow the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum using Development Matters statements and the National Curriculum, alongside the RSHE and the Religious Education agreed syllabus of Southwell and Nottingham Diocese.
Further curriculum details can be found in the class sections of the school website giving more detail on the content on the curriculum for each year group please use the following link https://www.suttonlound.notts.sch.uk/class-pages-4/
We implement our curriculum by enhancing the children's learning opportunities through a range of first-hand learning experiences, with the aim of hooking them in the learning.
Knowledge is repeated several times over the key stages allowing learning to be retained in the long-term memory with the repeated and layered approach.
Our Golden Threads document outlines for each subject the progression of knowledge and skills from EYFS to Year 6 and the inclusion strategies to ensure all pupils can access learning. These documents show how knowledge builds over time, how disciplinary skills develop and how barriers to learning are removed. They form the spine of the curriculum.
Our impact is fostering in every child a love of learning to equip them for a fulfilling future, aspiration to excellence and mutual celebration of achievements.
As learning is a change to long term memory, we do not expect to see short term impact but a development of disciplinary understanding over the key stages. We value the use of repeated verbal recall activities which embed learning as children are required to recall knowledge from their long-term memory. We also use and assess repeated, deliberate practise to ensure the children’s skills meet our long-term goals e.g. phonics assessments. We use comparative judgements to compare children’s work and their ability to use subject specific vocabulary which enables us to see progress over time. We talk to pupils about their learning and make observations about how their ability to verbalise their knowledge progresses over time. Teachers make assessment judgements for all subjects which are to evaluate/amend the curriculum and to inform adjustments/interventions for children.
Further detail about our school curriculum can be found below. If you require any more information, please speak to your child's class teacher and/or visit the class pages of the school website.