Our curriculum is driven by our school Christian vision and our belief that each child will flourish, achieve, develop resilience and experience ‘life in all its fullness.’ We believe in the immersive ‘culture of curriculum’ and our curriculum is continuously developed and updated as we reflect upon and improve our curriculum offer.
We recognise that young children need to ‘learn to read so that they can read to learn’ to empower them to access the curriculum. We use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds as our systematic synthetic phonics programme to enable our children to become fluent and confident readers. More information about this can be found on the phonics page.
In addition, children need to learn and understand mathematical knowledge, fluency and concepts in order to progress securely as a mathematician. We use the White Rose scheme which is adapted to meet the needs of our children and supported in Reception and Key Stage 1 by the NCETM Mastering Number resource from September 2023.
These ‘gateway skills’ are prioritised as essential components of our curriculum at Ashford C of E.
Subject Leaders work in collaboration with the leadership team to lead their curriculum subjects with passion, conviction and rigour.
Our curriculum is designed from the National Curriculum Programmes of Study and sets high expectations for children’s learning in line with our school vision encouraging all children to be the best that they can be. Our curriculum enables our children to achieve strong academic success and creates pathways and opportunities for their transition to KS3 and beyond.
The curriculum is inclusive and ensures that all are valued as individuals, enabling all children to discover their talents and interests and set high aspirations for the next stage of their schooling.
Every subject has a curriculum map, which sets out the aspirational progression of knowledge, skills and vocabulary which we expect children to learn and remember in the long term. These curriculum maps are coherently sequenced with every subject having an equal value. We celebrate and take pride that we are developing children’s love and engagement in art, design and technology, music, computing, geography and history as well as supporting children to achieve in the core subjects. All pupils receive the full National Curriculum throughout the school.
Our curriculum builds progressively upon children’s starting points and prior knowledge and skills. This helps our children to make links between concepts, committing information to their long-term memory which results in fluency within and across subjects.
Half termly themes are set for all year groups and links to this theme are explored where it fits with the curriculum progression for a subject. Enrichment opportunities are deliberately planned to link to the curriculum and develop children’s involvement and engagement with their learning.
Please see below for further details on the exciting themes that are being taught this year.
Curriculum Themes Overview (2023-24)
Individual year group curriculum maps for each half term can be found on the Year Group pages.