Intent

At the heart of our broad and balanced curriculum is the National Curriculum with a strong focus on reading, writing and maths. We use The National Curriculum as a springboard to provide ambitious learning opportunities whilst nurturing strong social, emotional and spiritual well-being all wrapped up in a rich cultural blanket of exciting enrichment experiences where we promote achievement in every area whilst nurturing social, emotional and spiritual well-being.

Through our curriculum and teaching, we want our children to be and learn about significant individuals with the essential knowledge and communication skills to succeed in life and to understand their place in our school, our town, our city, our country, and our world.

We want our children to consider the impact that they and others have on our planet and each other.

We have designed our curriculum to focus on these areas as we serve a diverse and very mobile population. Many of our children have English as an Additional Language, are new to the UK and may have little existing knowledge of UK history, culture and our place in the world. Community and a real sense of belonging is important to our school and the people who come here so use the experiences of significant individuals within our taught curriculum to remind ourselves that we are all change makers. All of these attributes and skills are also, obviously, important to our indigenous population too.

We make our curriculum accessible for those with disabilities or special educational needs by complying with our duties in the Equality Act 2010 and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014.

To ensure the most disadvantaged pupils in our school have the best opportunity to thrive academically, our Pupil Premium Strategy focuses on reading, vocabulary, vocabulary acquisition and speaking and listening and number fluency so that all pupils can access the curriculum. Similarly, we closely map out our provision for our SEND pupils, so that they gain the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in life.

We support the children in taking their place in society as active citizens, economically independent, exemplifying the British Values of equality, tolerance, democracy, individual liberty and rule of law.

Each term we suspend the usual curriculum for a week in order for everyone to take part in a Whole School Project Studies. Future themes will include Science Week, Creative Arts Week, Fair Trade Week, Money Matters/Careers Week, Equalities Week, Keeping Safe Week, Ecology Week.

As we are situated in central London, we use London as our classroom, providing pupils with a very wide range of off-site visits and visitors to enhance their learning.

Look at the Curriculum Map for an overview of subjects, year by year, term by term, week by week..

Look at the Fitzjohn’s Fact Files for Parents/Carers to see termly information about our curriculum content and how parents/carers might support children with their learning at home.

Curriculum Implementation

We follow these principles when planning our curriculum:

We ensure the content is relevant and coherently planned to ensure knowledge and skills are continuously developed and built upon;

We ensure the curriculum is engaging through inspiring resources and delivery;

Standards and clarity of progression are at the centre of our curriculum planning and design ensuring the level of challenge and expectation is high in all subject areas.

Pupils are engaged and motivated by a well-planned, stimulating thematic subject focused curriculum designed with the following elements:

Individuals:

Values – British and Fitzjohn’s Values are at the heart of life at the school. They feed into our curriculum and all that we do;

Impact – What impact do we have on others? What impact do others have on us?

Inclusion – Difference, in all it’s forms, is celebrated, shared and talked about. We teach children to stand up for what it right and to articulate their thoughts when something is not fair;

Community and belonging– Through our taught curriculum we help children understand that as individuals we all can have impact but as a group we are stronger and more powerful. We also want them to learn about significant individuals who have impacted our past and present and the impact people have had on history and the planet.

Through our enhanced and ‘hidden’ curriculum (such as social events, Sports Day, a wide range of clubs, visits, visitors, etc) the children learn that together we can achieve great things by supporting and encouraging each other.

Essential Knowledge and Communication:

Knowledge (national curriculum content and beyond) structured in a way that builds upon and extends prior learning;

Communication With planned opportunities to talk, read and write with an audience we want our children to be able to articulate their knowledge, skills and thoughts.

Understanding of our place in our country, the world and the impact that we have on it:

We are fortunate to serve a diverse and mobile population many of whom may not have knowledge of UK and wider world history.

History - Whether a child is here for two terms or their entire primary schooling, we want them to understand the rich history of the town, the city and the country in which we live.

We recognise that the UK’s history is a part of a global whole and we study the impact of the UK across the globe and the impact of other countries on us.

We plan a curriculum to include the richness of the world’s history and how it has helped create today’s civilisation.

Geography and Environmental Issues – We recognise that we have a responsibility in educating the children about the environment in which we live; be it locally, nationally or internationally.

We provide opportunities for the children to learn from and about each other’s countries, communities, religions, cultures and customs

We have a duty to ensure that children are aware of environmental damage and climate change and the impact that (through our choices) we have on the planet. We help children to understand what they can do to make a difference.

Our Learning Culture- The hidden Curriculum

The learning culture at Fitzjohn’s is promoted through our values and whole school vision. We instil high expectations in all our pupils with the importance of recognising their values each day.

At Fitzjohn’s we recognise the importance of our ‘hidden curriculum’.  This consists of our whole school commitment to knowing every child as an individual and celebrating the relationships that we establish throughout their life in school. Within our school, we ensure that children:

• Are greeted daily on entry to school
• Identify how they feel each day
• Build a relationship with adults throughout the school
• Feel that staff take time to get to know them as individuals
• Acknowledge one another and adults each day
• Take pride in all that they do
• Feel part of a community where they can flourish
• Recognise the importance of positive behaviours

 

Impact of the curriculum

We review our curriculum through regular subject reviews to ensure sequential, layered knowledge acquisition and check that pupil outcomes are of a very high quality.

Children love to share what they know and what they can do. They make very good progress as evidenced by our pupil achievement data year on year, the work in their books and their attitude to learning and to school.

	Fitzjohn's Curriculum Map 2023-2024	[pdf 636KB]
	Calculation Policy	[pdf 902KB]
	Cooking in the curriculum	[pdf 85KB]