West Coker CofE VC Primary School
'All Life's Strands Entwined'
Our Curriculum Intent – All Strands of Life Entwined
“Education should be about broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilisation. Ultimately, it is about leaving the world a better place than when we found it.”
– Amanda Spielman, June 2017
At West Coker CE VC Primary School, we encourage our children to ‘love learning’. We aim for them to be intellectually inquisitive and so become learners for life. We also encourage them to be ‘reflective learners’, who consider HOW they have learnt as well as WHAT they have learnt and so become independent in their learning.
Our Core Christian Values of Respect, Hope, Community, Wisdom and Kindness run through everything we do and help ensure that our pupils flourish and leave our school as conscientious, well-equipped citizens of the future. Together, we seek to embed a supportive, thoughtful and considerate atmosphere throughout that allows everyone to thrive.
We aim to teach topics that are relevant and inclusive for all, providing a platform for educational, physical, emotional and social growth. Our learning journeys in each class are designed to ensure children progressively build a body of knowledge, skills and understanding across core concepts.
We also aim for learning to be at a level, which encourages pupils to thrive on a sense of challenge and rewards perseverance towards individual and shared goals, whilst also ensuring that children maintain the feeling that their goals are achievable and manageable. We are very conscious that children will not achieve if they feel overwhelmed.
Mental Health and Well-Being
At West Coker C of E VC Primary School, we believe that for children to fulfil their potential they need to feel safe, grounded and happy.
Things we do to support mental health and well-being:
At West Coker C of E VC Primary School we understand that mental health and well-being is not just the absence of mental health problems. We aim for everyone in our school community to:
Please see our Mental Health and Well-Being pages for more information about this.
Cultural Capital
During their time at West Coker CE VC Primary School, a child will build ‘Cultural Capital’ through a diverse range of experiences that will enable them to grow as informed individuals as well as gaining a sense of belonging to our school community. We aim to ensure that during their time here they will experience the following:
:
During your child’s time with us, they can expect to experience visits and visitors to the school.
Our Curriculum Implementation
Our curriculum is modified from the Cornerstones Maestro Curriculum. We have designed it around the specific needs of our pupils using our locality, where applicable, and it is continually responsive. Consequently, our school curriculum is not static, it is continually adapting in response to our pupils’ changing needs. Our school staff are reflective practitioners, they consider what works and what does not, and review and refine the curriculum and their approach constantly.
The Core Christian Values of Respect, Hope, Community and Wisdom are the common thread that helps inform how we teach and interact with pupils and how we expect pupils to interact with one another.
Knowledge-led approach
Progression and Mastery
Local Context, Educational Visit & Visitors
Assessment
Leadership and management of the Curriculum
Our Curriculum Impact
As a result of our curriculum, most children who leave our school:
Please now visit our individual subject pages which will provide more in depth and specific information about how the subjects are organised. These pages will also articulate how the specific intent of each subject is implemented across the curriculum.
Christian Citizenship
We are proud of the area of our school curriculum that we call Christian Citizenship. This focuses on developing children’s personal and social skills, as well as their understanding of the world around them. It also supports the requirement, within the new National Curriculum, to prepare children for ‘Modern British Citizenship.’ We have now divided this curriculum into four areas and the children rotate through these areas on a half-termly basis. The areas are:
Caring Community –
The children work with and within the local community, learning about their local environment, its history and the people who live there.
We have been fortunate enough to establish a strong link with the local twine works and the children also work regularly with the village church. The children have visited people atthe village elderly people's home to chat, sing and play games. These sessions proved very rewarding for both sides.
See a report written for Somerset Museums:
Fun Foresters -
This promotes children’s interactions with each other and with the environment, nurturing cooperation and respect. We work both at school and in the field, exploring, creating, building and learning basic bushcraft skills. Some activities are linked directly to classroom learning in order to bring a more practical and real approach to the curriculum. Children of different ages working side by side enhances the family feel of our school.
International Issues –
To balance the work we are doing locally we believe it is important for children to develop understanding and empathy with the lives of people in other countries. We hope to establish a link with a location in another country and learn about their lifestyles. This area also lends itself to children's awareness of current affairs and built work around last year's Comic Relief event.
Life Skills -
The children learn important important skills and knowledge to help themselves and others inside and outside of school. These skills include making emergency calls, identifying allergies and anaphylaxis and how to respond.
All of these areas promote the core Christian values that are important to us as a Church School.
We asked the children what they had learned from Christian Citizenship this year. To read some of their responses, click here:
The school curriculum creates real opportunities to apply skills and knowledge from National Curriculum lessons and provides a stimulus for other classroom work.
Our school curriculum, along with many other things we do in school, helps to prepare children for modern British citizenship.
Reading
Reading is taught through a progression in synthetic phonics.
Our reading scheme merges a number of published schemes, including Oxford Reading Tree, Reading 360 and All Aboard, to provide the children with a broad range of materials and stimuli across the genres.
Our resources to support reading include a number of guided reading texts to engage reluctant readers, or those experiencing difficulties. We have also purchased the Phonic and Reading Bug online resources, which help to challenge and inspire all young readers.
Our main phonics teaching utilises Phonics Bug, which is an interactive resource based around a progressive synthetic phonics structure and is linked to the Reading Bug scheme. This matches children's phonic attainment levels to their reading attainment levels.
Our full curriculum is evolving to comply with the new National Curriculum requirements. Details of coverage can be found below.
Further information about our curriculum can be obtained by directly contacting the school.
You can also follow the link below, if you would like to see the full National Curriculum for primary schools in England: