Welcome from the Principal

Learning

This section of the website is about Learning at Peters Hill and includes information about our curriculum.

Fly high; Flourish and Fulfil
Ambition – Belief – Compassion – Pride – Respect

Our Curriculum approach is built around our aim of developing the full potential of the child through personal empowerment.

“Empowerment is the degree of autonomy and self determination in people and communities. It enables people to represent their interests in a responsible and self-determined way, acting on their own authority. Taking control, setting goals and making positive choices, understanding their strengths and weaknesses and having self-belief”

  • We want all children to understand and demonstrate our underlying principles of Ambition, Belief, Compassion, Pride and Respect as key personal empowerment strands.
  • We want all children to develop learning to learn skills of Character, Enquiry, Research, Social Development and Critical Thinking as supplementary strands.
  • We want our curriculum to enable children to become successful, confident, motivated and responsible individuals with a wealth of knowledge about the world around them.
  • We want all children to develop their full potential in a structured, caring and purposeful learning environment.
  • We want all children to understand the connections that exist between new learning and existing knowledge through an awareness of carefully chosen connections.

What is Curriculum and why is it important?

We aim to:

  • Develop a deep body of knowledge in all subject areas
  • Build knowledge up over time and understand expectations at the end of each phase of learning
  • Improve curriculum knowledge and expertise
  • Prevent curriculum narrowing and develop depth and breadth of content
  • Support social justice issues
  • Focus on subject disciplines
  • Have curriculum as a progression model with clear pathways in place
  • Have a clear purpose for assessment using a topic and schema approach
  • Continuously review and evaluate our curriculum design through research and development
  • Have clear curriculum leadership and ownership through a team approach
  • Consider our local context and filling gaps from pupil backgrounds

We aim to be clear that:

  • ‘Curriculum’ represents what is taught (The Content).
  • ‘Teaching activities’ represents how the curriculum content is taught.
  • ‘Assessment’ represents the desired high-level outcomes and measures of these.

At Peters Hill our definition of curriculum progress is:

  • Knowing more and remembering more against end of phase expectations
  • Alteration in long term memory.
  • A very rich knowledge of vocabulary.
  • The development of pupils ‘schema’ of understanding across topics and themes.

We aim to:

  • Avoid Knowledge deficits that build up over time.
  • Connect old knowledge to new knowledge.
  • Have evidence that the key content has been learned.
  • Strive for good teaching that ensures pupils make effective connections.

Cognitive Load Theory – the long term memory

At Peters Hill we aim to commit learning to a pupils long term memory. In order to do this we are aware of the principles of cognitive load theory and the importance of ensuring that all children are able to make connections to prior knowledge when facing new learning. To ensure this is prioritised across all subjects we ensure that topics and themes are sequenced under selected ongoing themes ‘Pathways’. As such we expect children to not only understand the subject they are learning about but also the ‘Pathway’ area that it is sequenced within e.g. A child may be in a History lesson in year 4 but should also understand that they are thinking about the pathway sequence in ‘British History’. Therefore ‘British History’ is the common connection between prior and new learning. Key connections are established for all subjects in all areas.   

Research Informed Practice

We have a commitment to being a reserach informed school. As such, all of our teaching staff are involved in professional development around teaching and learning strategies. This includes accessing our school CPD library on a regular basis and focusing on the development of key principles. These are set out in the teaching and learning policy shown below. Our policy focuses on the development of the following 7 areas;

  1. Learning Objectives and Outcomes
  2. Direct Instruction
  3. Questioning techniques
  4. Feedback to move learning forward
  5. Retrieval strategies and links to existing/previous learning
  6. High impact teaching – resource and activity choices
  7. Depth of learning and Challenge for all

Our curriculum teams partner with a range of associations to ensure that our decsion making is the best it can be. This includes working with other schools as needed. These teams hold 15 minute briefing workshops each week on a rota basis as a chance for staff to be continually updated on subject developments and best practice. We keep the development of teaching and learning across the school as a top priority for everyone. 

We also share half termly teaching and learning bulletins with staff to keep a sharp focus on the developements in teaching strategies across the school.

The links on the left hand side of the page will take you to each of our curriculum areas. Each area contains useful documents to show what we do and how we do it across the school. If you have any further questions about this then please do not hesitate to contact us.

 

Name Date  
Curriculum Intent Statement 9th May 2023 Download >
Curriculum Drivers 9th May 2023 Download >
Learning Skills Drivers 9th May 2023 Download >
Curriculum Journeys 9th May 2023 Download >
Teaching and Learning Policy May 23 10th May 2023 Download >