CURRICULUM INTENT, IMPLEMENTATION AND IMPACT

The philosophy behind our curriculum is the same as our school motto: INSPIRE, ACHIEVE, PREPARE FOR LIFE.

We want to inspire our pupils, enable them to achieve and ultimately, prepare them for life. We base our curriculum planning and delivery on these principles, as well as using our research and the underlying pedagogy offered by The Great Teaching Toolkit, The 5 A Day Approach and our Active Teaching and Learning policy.

We INSPIRE our pupils by following Mary Myatt's principles of delivering our curriculum using well-thought out resources. We are passionate about developing the children's vocabularly by exposing them to high quality texts that offer high challenge and low threat. The children of Lydiate love it when they know their work is tricky and makes them think!

In order to ACHIEVE, pupils need to successfully learn age-appropriate content. We know from research that ideas are not learned until they are committed to long term memory, so we provide various ways to help the children to hold onto their learning. We also ensure that the knowledge pupils acquire as they move through each year group in the school, from Nursery to Year 6, is built progressively over time. This allows pupils to understand increasingly complex ideas and undertake increasingly complex tasks in all subjects, since they are building on secure foundations. Our curriculum journey begins in our wonderful Early years department where we have ensured that our Early years curriculum has been designed so it offers progression across the 7 areas of learning. The learning that takes place in the Early Years then feeds into our Key Knowledge Progression documents, one for each area of the currculum from Nursery to Y6. 

Each curriculum leader is extremely passionate about their subject and has taken a great deal of time and care to ensure that children are inspired by appropriately challenging, interesting and relevant content. Subject leaders have gone to great lengths to research the very best way to teach their particular subject. To this end, we use a variety of platforms and published schemes as starting points for our curriculum planning. For example, we have chosen the bright, engaging and inspirational scheme offered by kapow upon which to base our planning for Computing and Art; the kitemarked, media-rich and interactive scheme 1Decision to base our PSHE planning and the comprehensive, progressive and award-winning Complete P.E. upon which to develop our PE strategy. See below a full list of schemes that we use at Lydiate.

English - Lancashire Planning using KLIPS - Key Learning Indicators of Performance

Maths - Lancashire Planning using KLIPS - Key Learning Indicators of Performance

PE - Complete PE

PSHE/RSE - One Decision

MFL (Modern Foreign Languages) - Language Angels - French

D&T (Design and Technology) - PlanBee

RE - Sefton agreed syllabus

Science - Rising Stars

History - Rising Stars

Geography - Rising Stars

Computing - Kapow

Art - Kapow

Music - Bespoke - written by a music specialist to encourage writing music and notation.

Each subject leader has then researched and isolated chunks of knowledge that will take place across the school, ensuring that the National Curriculum is covered and beyond.

We acknowledge the research dictating that children will not learn if they are cognitively overloaded. To this end, each leader has identified four important chunks of learning that all children will master within each unit, in every year group and within every term. Once this key learning has been taught, teachers assess the impact of the curriculum in terms of how well the pupils have remembered these concepts, address any gaps in knowledge and give opportunities for children to apply what they know before they move on.

In summary, our pupils are prepared for life, since the knowledge they acquire is relevant and interesting, built progressively and learned thoroughly helping them for the next stage in school or on to KS3. 

The intent of our curriculum is set out clearly - please look at each subject page to find out the exact key knowledge and progression for each subject across each year group. The implementation is delivered through a variety of extremely carefully planned lessons and assessment activities. The impact is the excellent progress that our pupils make, which is assessed, addressed and applied within each unit. 

We are proud of our curriculum and the time and work that we dedicate to it which will always be on-going as we strive to push the scope of the curriculum ever further.  We hold meet the teacher events to share with you what your child will be learning and how you can support them at home.

Parents, we encourage you to read each subject page, talk to your children about their learning and look at the fantastic work in their books at our 'Come Learn with Me' and Parents Evenings events.

Please also see class pages for specific information about your child's learning within the current term.

If you have any further questions about our curriculum, please feel free to ask your child's class teacher.