We have a long-held, embedded ethos that children learn best when a curriculum has rigour, challenge, depth, breadth and connects areas of learning. This fosters a love of learning, enables children to achieve excellence and it is inclusive so that everyone knows they belong at Eleanor Palmer.
Our core purpose is to ensure all of our pupils achieve excellence in all aspects of literacy and maths leaving this school with both high levels of attainment and having progressed well from their starting points. We we will be more successful if this core goal is enshrined in a clear and shared approach to teaching and learning and to our school ethos and values.
Our curriculum is designed so that pupils will leave EP with a treasury of primary school memories and broad, deep rooted curriculum knowledge.
They will be:
- fluent, comprehending readers with a love of books;
- fluent mathematicians, with a confidence in problem solving and reasoning;
- clear and engaging writers who can communicate their thoughts and feelings; and
- happy, healthy, interested and interesting.
All of this begins in EYFS, which is the foundation.
Our Curriculum meets the aims of The National Curriculum of England and Wales and we have sequenced learning in each subject so that every child at Eleanor Palmer builds knowledge lesson on lesson, term on term and year on year until they leave us at the end of Year 6. Our Subject Verticals show how this progression of knowledge is planned and how connections are made.
Our topic approach means that classes study one subject-based topic more deeply for a term, building diverse cultural capital and an impressive body of knowledge. Three termly topics are geography-based, history-based or science-based, and include enriching visits and visitors. For example, Year 4 has a history-based topic in the Autumn: Romans in Britain. Our Topic Map gives an overview.
We have designed our topics carefully so that our leaders and teachers know what is taught in each subject, each year, and why. This means that children can build new concepts, linking their thinking back to what they learnt in previous years.
For each topic, we share key concepts and knowledge with the children in knowledge organisers . To ensure the children remember what they have been taught and make connections with prior learning, we have regular low-stakes quizzes based on these.
We have a strong commitment to ensuring children create and innovate, and engage with their world. We aim to make every child’s learning vivid, real, engaging and memorable, providing challenges that encourage their development in all areas.
Our children tell us year after year that this is how they love learning and when they come back to visit us as teenagers and young adults (and they frequently do!) we have proof that this approach has made them life-long learners. We have over 1,000 pages on our website capturing our rich and engaging curriculum over several years. Here are links to examples of work in each subject:
