Our Curriculum Intent

Our school provides a broad and balanced curriculum which challenges learners, encourages curiosity and inspires lifelong learning. We intend to be active in our efforts to ensure our children are provided with opportunities and means to reach out beyond our community to understand their role as global citizens who have an awareness of wider, global issues.

Promoting our pupils’ independence and critical thinking is a key driver underpinning our curriculum, allowing our children to develop their understanding of learning. We promote effective metacognitive strategies to support children in developing their thinking and exercising effective self-motivation and self-regulation. With metacognition as our priority, our curriculum is designed with a thorough knowledge of the progress children need to make. We ensure that learning is sequenced in a way so children can securely use their prior knowledge and understanding to make links with new areas of learning.

We celebrate our children as individuals and help them to recognise their own successes and talents and how they contribute to the wider ethos of the school. Our curriculum evolves reflecting how well we know our children and our implementation strategies are pertinently tailored to their needs; underpinned by secure foundation of reading, oracy and mathematical fluency. We intend for our curriculum to prepare our children to live successfully in an ever-changing modern society.

Why do we do what we do?

Established in 1691 by Edward Browne, we are pleased to serve the communities of Horbling and Swaton. We have a long history of service to the local community stretching back over 300 years. The choices around our school curriculum offer are based on our extensive and detailed knowledge of our families and the changing landscape in which members of our school community reside. We have used data and information from the Indices of Deprivation from 2019 to support the curriculum decisions we have made to ensure our curriculum provides our children with the Cultural Capital needed to prepare them for future success.

Thinking Frames

We use Thinking Frames to implement every area of our curriculum. Thinking Frames are a set of dual coding, graphic organisers that offer learners a way to improve knowledge recall and explicitly see, develop and reflect on their own cognitive processes. A separate frame exists for eight key thinking processes that are the fundamental scaffolds behind a pupil’s ability to answer test questions, solve problems and develop ‘higher order’ thinking. They facilitate a whole school approach to embedding metacognition and are a vital tool in enabling this development to continue during any stages of remote learning.