Curriculum

At Mereside Primary Academy our curriculum has been carefully designed to meet the needs of all our children who predominantly live on the Mereside Estate. Much emphasis is placed upon character development and interpersonal skills, alongside the knowledge base of individual academic subjects. We strongly believe that our curriculum must meet the needs of the local community and the needs of the wider society in developing our children’s resilience, creativity and interpersonal skills for their future role in society and the ‘soft’ skills future employers will value. Preparation at Mereside Primary Academy for their next stage of education is key to each child’s future success both at secondary school and beyond.

We aim to give each child as broad and relevant an education as possible. In doing so we hope to develop fully the abilities and knowledge which each child possesses. Our dedicated staff have the highest expectations for all pupils as we strive to give each child the best start in life. Work is planned to cater for the needs of each child, to develop their intellectual, social, moral, spiritual and physical potential. We embrace change and aim to provide a breadth of opportunities and knowledge to inspire a love of learning.

At Mereside, we aim to engage and enthuse all children at every opportunity/stage of learning. Through school, we strive to provide opportunities that enrich our children’s lives and show them possibilities. Our fundamental aim is to improve the life chances of all our pupils. Mereside Primary provides an inclusive environment where children are challenged and encouraged to take an active role in their learning. Our ‘Curriculum Story’ aids the children’s ability to see links between their knowledge and what they are learning to embrace their next steps.

Within the community as many links as possible are made from being involved in local events, inviting people into school and sharing our learning with others e.g. Distributing newspaper reports on the estate, sharing puppet shows with local playgroups or creating Christmas crafts to sell to the local community to name just a few examples.

We believe our ‘soft skills’ for becoming a successful member of our community can be shown through the following areas:

Alongside this, all staff are committed to ensuring that our breadth of curriculum, and lesson delivery, is designed with three key goals in mind:

1. To give pupils appropriate experiences to develop as confident, responsible citizens;

We have developed three curriculum drivers that shape our curriculum, bringing about the aims and values of our school, and to respond to the particular needs of our community;

Possibilities – which helps pupils to build aspirations and know available possibilities for their future lives.

Initiative – which enables children to make decisions and take the lead in their learning.

Diversity – to enable our children to see different viewpoints, and know that people have different ideas and beliefs and that this is ok.

2. To provide a rich ‘cultural capital’;

Cultural capital is ‘the essential knowledge that pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said and helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement’ (National Curriculum). Cultural capital is the background knowledge of the world children need to infer meaning from what they read. It includes vocabulary, which we systematically introduce through our curriculum. This, in turn, helps pupils to express themselves in an increasingly mature way.

At Mereside, powerful subject knowledge is key to our success and we ensure our pupils gain cultural capital through our well-planned, broad and rich curriculum. This works alongside our personal development offer which gives opportunities to build character and develop informed opinions alongside vital knowledge around health, well-being and relationships.

We plan our cultural capital through the breadth of our curriculum around what is required, what is implicit in the requirements and our local needs.

At Mereside we also pride ourselves on our Entitlement Curriculum which                     incorporates the Royal Shakespeare Company, numerous trips to the theatre, museums and art galleries, visiting musicians etc whilst all children have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument through their time here at Mereside. Alongside this we have also been awarded a Music Mark, Rainbow Flag award and Anti-Bullying award.

3. To provide a coherent, structured, academic curriculum that leads to sustained mastery for all and a greater depth of understanding for those who are capable.

A coherently planned academic curriculum that is underpinned by our three drivers that sets out:

1. A clear list of the breadth of topics that will be covered;
2. The knowledge and taught concepts pupils should understand and remember;
3. The clear progression within the knowledge and taught concepts;
4. Development of subject specific vocabulary

Through KS1 and KS2 there are mixed year group classes. Here we ensure that ALL children, regardless of which class or year group they are in, have access to the same mastery approach and knowledge input.

Sustained Mastery:

As a school we believe that nothing is learned unless it rests in pupils’ long-term memories. This does not happen and cannot be assessed in the short term. Assessment, therefore answers two main questions:

1. How well are pupils coping with curriculum content?
2. How well are they retaining previously taught content?

At Mereside Primary our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science and two main principles reflect our beliefs:

1. Learning is most effective with spaced repetition.
2. Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage and retrieval strength.

In addition to these principles we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term memory and that sustained mastery takes time.

By the end of each key stage the vast majority of pupils have mastered the content of our curriculum. Some children will have demonstrated a greater depth of understanding. We track carefully to ensure pupils are on track to reach the expectations of our curriculum.