At the Mary Towerton School, our curriculum is designed and delivered with every pupil in mind. This is to ensure that:

 Every Child reaches their Potential

As part of our curriculum development, in order to help each individual child with their learning journey, we have implemented five key learning characteristics. This approach is to help all children become better learners, both in and out of The Mary Towerton School.

These learning behaviours are Resilience, Reflectiveness, Risk taking, Relationships and Resourcefulness. 

These learning characteristics help facilitate a positive culture in classrooms that cultivates learning habits and attitudes that enable children to face difficulty and uncertainty, calmly, confidently and creatively. This is not an approach that is additional to teaching; it is an integral part of it, embedded in everything we do at The Mary Towerton School.

We want our children to be sufficiently confident to take risks, understand and acknowledge both their strengths and weaknesses and welcome challenge and complex learning. We want them to enjoy the struggle, seek those tasks which are stimulating and inspiring even if they are demanding. We also want our children to learn to work effectively in a team and alone.

Aims (INTENT) - Our curriculum will:

1. Be firmly based on our children and their present and future relationships with the locality and wider world
2. Be rich, broad and balanced and meaningful
3. Consider the well being of the children as a whole
4. Enable all children to reach their full potential in all areas of the curriculum as well as developing individual talents and interests
5. Encourages children to ask and answer questions about important issues and events
6. Develop highly functional, independent, flexible learners for now and the future

Principles - In order to achieve these aims, we will plan learning experiences that:

1. Are firmly based on our children and their present and future relationship with the locality and wider world:

• Use contexts based where possible on the local and extending to the national and global
• Respond to current events or issues at a local and wider level
• Provide opportunities for children to make a positive contribution to the community, both locally and in the wider world
• Place the school at the heart of our community

2. Be rich, broad and balanced and meaningful:

• Meet and go beyond the requirements of the National Curriculum
• Make links within and between subjects.
• Include a variety of stimuli, contexts, types of activity and means of expression that are relevant to the children and have a clear purpose

3. Consider the well-being of the children as a whole:

• Have social, moral and spiritual and cultural aspects embedded within all areas
• Promote a healthy lifestyle (mental and physical)
• Enable children to develop the personal skills needed for happy and successful future lives

4. Enable all children to reach their full potential in all areas of the curriculum as well as developing individual talents and interests:

• Are challenging for all
• Provide plentiful opportunities for children to apply what they have learned in other contexts
• Respond to the needs and interests of the children

5. Encourages children to ask and answer questions about important issues and events:

• Inspire - through exciting and relevant topics with engaging starters, memorable events and motivating outcomes
• Use 'Big Questions' to stimulate children's interest and encourage them to think about topics in a broader and more significant context
• Encourage children to question and hypothesise

6. Develop highly functional, independent, flexible learners for now and the future:

• Embed core skills in mathematics, literacy and ICT across the curriculum
• Teach key life skills
• Encourage children to be adventurous and regard mistakes as opportunities for learning
• Teach children how to learn as well as what to learn, so they are prepared for whatever they may need to learn in the future
• Provide opportunities for children to take control of their own learning

Organisation and Planning

We plan our curriculum in three phases.

• Long Term Plan that has been planned for the whole school on a rolling cycle. This plan indicates what topic is to be taught in each term. We review our long term plan on an annual basis.
• Medium Term Plans break down each term into weekly overviews for all subjects. The school follows the National Curriculum to ensure appropriate coverage. In Mathematics, we use and adapt the White Rose and Power Maths learning scheme. In English, we ensure quality first texts are chosen and used to aid the teaching of the English curriculum. We use Kapow teaching resource to aid the delivery of the foundation subjects and adapting them as needed to meet the needs of our pupils.
• Short Term Plans are those that our teachers write on a weekly basis. We use these to set our learning objectives for each session and to identify the resources and activities we going to use in the lesson. The short term plans are effective working documents.

We plan the curriculum carefully, so that there is coherence and full coverage of all aspects of the National Curriculum and Early Learning Goals and there is planned progression in all curriculum areas.

Whole School Special Curriculum Events 

Curriculum Subjects