Our Curriculum Intent
Our Curriculum Intent
At Branton Community Primary School and Breamish Valley Community Nursery we provide education for a mainly rural and quite remote community. Our catchment area serves the Breamish Valley, and stretches over to Eglingham and the surrounding area, and encompassing the villages of Ingram, Powburn, and Beanley.
Our school is also chosen by parents outside of our catchment area due to our family ethos and our small numbers which allows us to know children well and focus on them as individuals, moving them forward in their learning from their starting points.
Our curriculum provides stimulating experiences both within the classroom, and also in our extensive outdoor spaces. The Forest School ethos and philosophy underpins much of our curriculum.
As we have mixed age classes our termly curriculum plans enable us to address a variety of different topics while taking into account the National Curriculum expectations for each year group. We use a cross curricular approach that allows pupils to apply their skills of English and Mathematics across the whole curriculum. This enables our children to appreciate the relevance of core skills and supports the development of mastery within these subjects and their application within real life contexts.
We are fortunate to have extensive outdoor spaces and a well-established Forest School that enables us to have a strong focus on outdoor learning. In our Forest School we promote working together, development of key life skills and developing independence alongside supporting curriculum knowledge and understanding.
This is supported by carefully selection of educational visits both within Northumberland and beyond which enrich and inspire pupils’ learning.
Our more able pupils are challenged further through research, debate and enquiry. They are given opportunity to reason and problem solve across the curriculum.
SEND pupils are identified early and our curriculum supports every child/pupil to move forward in their learning and achieve success. Targeted support and interventions enable pupils to move forward on their learning journey, and specialist support is sought when appropriate to enable all children to achieve and aspire.
Our curriculum meets the needs of our disadvantaged pupils by being practical, creative and inclusive, and it includes lots of discussion, practical and visual stimulus.
Due to our excellent ratio of adults to pupils there is space in every school day for discussion, and every child is encouraged to share their views and opinions. A language rich environment promotes language development in all pupils from the very first day they join us.
Our curriculum is supported by a wide and varied range of quality texts and the acquisition of phonetic and higher level reading skills is key to children being able to access the school curriculum fully.