Welcome to our curriculum page. Across our schools we work hard to ensure our children receive a broad and balanced curriculum which develops skills and provides a knowledge base that inspires them to learn more.  We want our children to value education and to love learning.

We seek to prepare our children for life beyond our building and for the world of tomorrow; 

to be grounded young people that make a difference in the world in which they live. To challenge and question when faced with the unknown or injustices, not simply comply. 

We believe that a culture of learning, built on strong relationships and a curriculum that is planned with key skills and knowledge at its heart, is what our children need and deserve.

We don’t just ‘value’ working with families, we KNOW it is the key to success and our culture is based on collaborative and supportive home school links.

Our curriculum develops the acquisition of knowledge and language through explicit teaching of each National Curriculum subject, with opportunities to revise, review and revisit previous learning until key skills and knowledge are ingrained.

We have adopted a mastery/enquiry-learning model to form the basis of our approach to teaching and learning. This means spending greater time going into depth in a subject as opposed to racing through things to gain only surface understanding.

Previously, racing through content lead to some children having large gaps in subject knowledge because the concept they had just learnt was either too complex or learnt too quickly. It is our duty to ensure that children have a secure, concrete understanding of subject knowledge and skills as well as being emotionally resilient for secondary school.

Learning takes place at a deep and steady pace - pausing the learning to notice, ask questions, follow lines of enquiry and discuss these with others – we strongly embrace the work of Bill Lucas and Ellen Spencer in the way we approach teaching creative thinking within our lessons. In addition, this approach fosters critical-thinking skills and provides richer learning experiences for our children.

We focus on all children achieving what is expected of their age group and not going beyond this. Evidence shows that children need to be able to understand a concept, apply it in a range of situations and then be creative to really understand and apply it. At our school no child will be taught content from the year group above them, they will spend time becoming true masters of content, applying and being creative with new knowledge and skills in multiple ways.

In short, this means working towards the following:

Teach Simply 

Model effectively 

Practise thoroughly 

Feedback constructively 

Aspire for excellence 

Which means: 

● Less teacher-talk and more pupil-talk

● Space and time to experience and apply learning

● Support for children to help them to access the curriculum

● Making learning creative, relevant and purposeful

All of this means a change in the way we organise learning, teach and assess children and judge progress, which will be markedly different from when you were at school. 

We are now doing more of the following:

● Teaching all children in class, together, most of the time

● Following children’s lines of enquiry

● Giving children more choice in what they learn/how they learn/how they present their learning

● Returning to key concepts – through our own bespoke spiral curriculum

● Spending longer on one idea

● Verbal feedback during lessons, focused highlighting in books and direct feedback

● Giving children who need it, additional support over shorter, more intense periods

● Regular mini assessments/quizzes, built into learning through cumulative questioning, with a few formal tests over the year

And less of the following:

● Covering lots of ideas in one week

● Moving on to new concepts when children are still not secure

● Formal, long term interventions to boost children, taking place out of the classroom

● Separating children into ability groups

● Formal marking with lots of written feedback and highlighting

● Formal testing of children

This approach is seen as good practice. It is promoted by the government and seen as the best way to deliver the National Curriculum

Our curriculum is currently dynamic and being regularly reviewed to develop more creative pathways for our children to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum, which is rightfully ensuring that all children are exposed to learning experiences which drive ever higher outcomes for them. 

We are committed to ensuring the best for all our Bushey Federation children through  ensuring capacity for a range of pathways, with different paces to meet the needs of individual learners and their differing needs. Reasonable adjustments sit as part of our curriculum offer in each curriculum area to help us serve the needs of all learners and adjust our curriculum accordingly. Our School Development Plan is very much centred around the evolution of our curriculum, you can find it attached below.