Curriculum Intent
At Buckingham Primary Academy we have designed a purposeful, inspiring, broad and aspirational curriculum. We place high value on the application of oracy for children to believe, persevere and achieve their dreams.
Our curriculum has been carefully designed to shape and enable our children to have the confidence and resilience to retrieve existing knowledge and skills to apply new knowledge learnt and develop new and existing skills to become confident, responsible and successful learners in the 21st Century.
Reading and high-quality texts are at the heart of the curriculum. The curriculum has reading for purpose at its very core. Each unit of work has a high-quality, age-appropriate texts which carefully enhance the curriculum driver. These texts engage, inspire and deepen understanding. Supplementary texts support pupils in other curriculum subjects to enrich their knowledge, vocabulary and curriculum skills.
Every curriculum session structure begins with a retrieval activity, a rehearsal of the narrative of learning and pupils use this to discuss new knowledge, deepen their enquiry skills and form links in their learning, making use of their oracy skills. Each enquiry question gives children another opportunity to show knowledge in a different context, build schema and reinforce retention of facts. All learning is mastery of skills, which are progressive through the year and key stage. They embed key skills and knowledge so that they are building on prior learning.
Every child is recognised as a unique individual. We celebrate and welcome differences within our diverse academy. We have developed an accessible and inclusive curriculum for ALL with a wide range of enquiry questions, high aspirations and a belief to achieve through perseverance and collaboration. Our children’s cultural capital is varied as our children come from a wide range of backgrounds. Our curriculum aims to close the cultural capital gap for the most disadvantaged children in our community.
We aim to give children a deeper knowledge of the world outside of their local community and show them what possibilities are available to them in terms of education, experiences, and achievements. This will enable ALL our children to actively contribute to the community and their wider society in a positive way.
Our children will leave Buckingham Primary Academy with personal pride and respect for one another. Our children will have a deepened understanding and the emotional intelligence to keep themselves and their community safe in an ever changing society.
Curriculum Overview
A 3D Curriculum
Our school’s curriculum design and model is that of a ‘3D Curriculum’. This focuses on making links or connections between different topics and year groups rather than studying topics in isolation. There are three main types of link:
- Horizontal Links: between subjects in a year
- Vertical Links: within a subject year on year
- Diagonal Links: between year groups and subjects.
Children have the opportunity to deepen their understanding by building on their webs of knowledge and applying it to deepen their knowledge. The link below shows how our knowledge rich enquiry topics have been mapped out across Foundation Stage, KS1 and KS2 to create purposeful and connective webs of knowledge for all our children at Buckingham Primary Academy.
Our school curriculum draws on the National Curriculum (2014) but has been adapted considerably to suit our learners in our community including closing the gap for our most disadvantaged children.
In each year group, the following subjects are taught daily:
- English
- SPaG
- Phonics in FS and KS1 (Little Wandle Phonics scheme is followed and more can be read about this within the Phonics Intention Statement below)
- Mathematics
- Arithmetic
These subjects are taught each week:
- Science
- Computing
- Physical Education
- PSHE and emotional intelligence (we follow the Jigsaw scheme and more can be read below under the PSHE Overview)
The rest of the curriculum is blocked into enquiry topics which are knowledge – rich and based around the following subjects:
- History
- Geography
- RE
- Art and Design
- Music
- MfL
If you would like more information on our curriculum please visit us and ask to speak to Miss Hillman, Principal or Mrs Thorpe, Vice-Principal. We are very excited and proud of our curriculum and we would be happy to answer any questions you may have.
