Curriculum Rationale

What our children learn and how they learn it is of great importance and we give serious thought to how we design our curriculum.

The foundation of our curriculum is our schools’ shared vision. It is summarised in our mission statement:

We see our curriculum as ever-changing to meet the needs of the children in our community in our unique setting. We are acutely aware that the children in our school have unique needs and we are constantly assessing and striving to meet them.

While our curriculum is constantly changing, it is however guided by some carefully chosen principles listed below:

• the National Curriculum has been used as basis of our curriculum. We acknowledge it as a document which identifies much of the knowledge and skills that our children should learn;
• our curriculum is influenced by the school’s Christian values and ethos;
• it is designed to be ‘broad and balanced’ so that children experience a truly comprehensive education,
• we acknowledge that our curriculum should provide opportunities for children to experience what their peers may already have had the good fortune to experience outside school. We take our responsibility to social justice seriously;
• similarly, we acknowledge that our children are unique by token of the rural setting they live in and so take this into account in our curriculum design while including local, national and international aspects;
• our curriculum is knowledge-rich as we believe knowledge is invaluable;
• we know that knowledge is interconnected and our curriculum is developed so that children build on their prior learning and make connections between different subjects and disciplines;
• reading, and in particular the acquisition of vocabulary, is important in our curriculum because learning is highly dependent on being able to understand, talk and write about all aspects of it;