Our School Curriculum

The Vision for our Curriculum at Dronfield Junior School

We want to see all our pupils thrive as successful learners academically and socially through high quality teaching and an enriched, skills based and knowledge rich curriculum.
We want to produce exceptional outcomes whilst developing children’s independence, curiosity, resilience and creativity.
We aim to meet to the needs of all learners in our curriculum, challenging them and enabling them to think critically and problem solve.
We want our curriculum to inspire our pupils to develop deeper thinking skills so they learn to question, reflect and innovate. We want to produce collaborators, leaders and innovators that have a thirst for life-long learning.
We aim to develop, independent, thinking pupils who are ambitious, emotionally equipped and confident to make good life choices.
We want our pupils to understand their own emotional health and wellbeing and how address their own happiness.
We encourage our pupils to relate well to one another with confidence, respect openness and care.

We continually look to adapt, review and refresh our curriculum so that it addresses the needs and aspirations of our pupils. We appreciate that our pupils will be the voices of the future and we want them to make a difference to future society.

Our curriculum is best explained through the answers to the questions below:

Intent: What should pupils know by the time they leave Dronfield Junior School?

Implementation: How do we teach our curriculum?

Impact: How do we know how well our pupils have leaned the curriculum?

Curriculum Purpose

Our carefully planned and deliberately designed curriculum is rigorous and robust, placing knowledge at its core. Through acquiring this knowledge base, pupils are able to build key skills allowing links to be made both across and within subjects. Our curriculum is coherently sequenced with the ‘end point’ always the goal, meaning staff work backwards to ensure pupils learn the necessary knowledge, skills and attitudes to achieve mastery across the curriculum as each lesson builds on the knowledge that has come before.

Reading and vocabulary acquisition are central to the curriculum, underpinning the learning in all subjects. The curriculum at Dronfield Junior School is ever evolving and founded upon well-evidenced research especially with regards to cognitive science, focusing on how pupils learn, retain information and knowledge with a particular emphasis on the working and long term memory.

Intent (Aims)

We want to see all our pupils thrive as successful learners socially, and academically, through high quality teaching and an enriched, knowledge-led curriculum.
We aim to develop independently thinking pupils who are ambitious, emotionally equipped and confident enough to make good life choices.
We encourage our pupils to relate well to one another with confidence, care and respect.
We aim to meet the needs of all learners in our curriculum, challenging them and enabling them to critically think, problem solve and undertake learning at a deeper level.
We want all pupils to develop cultural capital to have the knowledge, behaviours and skills to face the future with confidence.
We want all pupils to be able to read at an age-appropriate level.

Teaching Implementation

Our provision is informed by educational research into effective teaching practices and cognitive science on how knowledge and understanding happens. Our approach is explicit in our Teaching and Learning policy.

Teachers have deep knowledge of the subjects they teach and develop in pupils well-connected networks of ideas (schema).
Teaching provides opportunities for pupils to connect new knowledge with existing knowledge so they have fluency and can unconsciously apply their knowledge as skills.
Teachers must assess learning and provide timely feedback, reshape learning and adapt teaching as needed.
Pupil groupings are flexible, changed regularly and not driven by perceived “ability” or prior attainment.
The learning environment culture is calm with the expectations that all pupils work hard and can excel.
All pupils are involved in the lesson. Teachers ask many questions by cold calling, think/pair/share.
We strive to develop strong partnerships with parents and carers that influence good attitudes to learning at home and school.
We advocate direct instruction and the use of “I do, We do, You do” or modelling, guided practice and independent practice.
We use spaced repetition to combat the Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.
We use guided groups to extend guided practice.
We use continuous formative assessment to improve not prove.
At the start of each lesson, we recap prior learning.
We value pupils knowing more and remembering more.
We adapt instruction to meet the needs of individual pupils

Impact

Our curriculum has an ambition for high achievement for all pupils irrespective of background or starting point. This achievement is represented in three key areas:

IMPACT 1: High Standards in attainment

Pupils consistently attain in line, and often, higher than national averages.
Pupils are given opportunities to achieve at higher standards.
Assessment shows that knowledge acquired through education and experience and the skills (the know how to apply the known) are well sequenced, progressive, coherent and embedded throughout the curriculum.

IMPACT 2: Inspiring Excellence

Pupils are confident and successful learners, demonstrating our learning values, cognitive, physical, social and emotional skills. They are very well-prepared for future learning.
The curriculum framework is designed to give disadvantaged pupils access to the knowledge they need in order to succeed in line with their peers.
Good provision and outcomes for SEND pupils based on their starting points.

IMPACT 3: Personal Development

Pupils demonstrate behaviour that reflects the school’s values in lessons and around the school.
Pupils make the right choices for their safety and these choices benefit the school and the wider community.
A strong tradition of sport, fitness and physical development.

Click here to read our Curriculum Policy

Click here for the National Curriculum

If you would like to find out more about our school curriculum, please contact the school office.