Intent
At James Oglethorpe we endeavour to instil a lifelong thirst for learning through a Curriculum that both inspires and excites all of our children. We recognise that all pupils are entitled to have access to a broad range of learning experiences which allow them to develop the knowledge, understanding, skills and attitudes necessary to prepare them for and to help them succeed as members of the wider community. The children are at the heart of our curriculum planning and we ensure that we provide opportunities for all pupils to learn and to achieve, irrespective of social background, culture, race, gender. We place an emphasis on spiritual, moral, social and cultural development across our curriculum and support children in developing principles for distinguishing between right and wrong through linking teaching to our school values: Aspiration, Integrity, Identity.
Should you like any further information on our curriculum, please contact your child’s teacher.
Alternatively, send an email to office@jops.org.uk detailing the information you require.
Curriculum Implementation
Using the National Curriculum to underpin our curriculum, subjects are carefully planned and sequenced, mapping out the key knowledge and subject specific skills children need to master at each stage. Where there are strong, purposeful links in subject themes, knowledge and vocabulary, these are built upon through deliberate topic mapping to maximise this. For most subjects, the school has developed its own sequential and progressive curriculum to ensure the school’s local context is reflected. For others, the school has adopted, and then adapted, external schemes of work.
Each unit has essential learning questions outlined that children explore, as well as key subject skills children need to develop from early years to year 6. The knowledge and skills are both progressive and support the development of key concepts and schemas. Key vocabulary is highlighted and taught explicitly to the children throughout all lessons, and recall of key and prior knowledge is embedded into every lesson, in line with the school’s teaching and learning policy. Exposure to high quality texts is consistent across the curriculum, ensuring reading and vocabulary opportunities are maximised.
Curriculum Subjects: Science, History, Geography, Art, Computing, DT, Music, RE, PSHE and PE
Our engaging and rich curriculum is planned around purposeful learning experiences that encourage collaboration, progression in knowledge, and enquiry based learning to stimulate enjoyment. All pupils receive specialist teaching for PE and Music each week from our sports teacher and music teacher.
Below you can find information about the range of ‘topics’ each year group will cover for each subject.
Maths and English
Here you can find more information about the specific approaches and schemes we use to teach these subjects at James Oglethorpe.
Curriculum Impact
How we teach our curriculum
At JOPS our teaching and learning policy highlights our consistent pedagogical approach across all subjects and it ensures that all teachers to have a shared vision of successful teaching and learning practices which motivate, engage, challenge and celebrate all children. As a result, we have adopted the coaching culture based on the ‘Teaching Walkthrus’ programme of evidence informed teaching strategies. This programme consists of six key modules: Behaviour and Relationships; Curriculum Planning; Explaining and Modelling; Questioning and Feedback; Practice and Retrieval and Mode B teaching. These modules are systematically covered in the fortnightly staff training sessions and include ideologies, teaching strategies and practical examples from established theories, research and educators. As a result of the training, current practices are reviewed and improved and new teaching and learning ideas and strategies are developed and, if successful, established. In addition, many teachers work in coach-coachee partnerships of instructional coaching to better implement the new strategies, which is in line with our school value of aspiration; we are always trying to improve.
Our Key teaching intentions:
- Teachers have secure subject knowledge
- Prior knowledge is explored, recapped and built upon
- Retrieval opportunities are provided across all subjects
- Knowledge and skills are progressive
- Learning questions and steps to being successful are made explicit
- Vocabulary is explicitly taught in all lessons
- A range of formative assessment strategies are used
- Scaffolded planned activities ensure expectations remain high and all learners can be successful
- Metacognitive skills are developed and promoted across all areas of learning
There have been many successful changes to our school due to the ‘Walkthrus’. Some of these include alterations to the planning of our curriculum to include more open-ended and challenging tasks and modifications to the structure of our foundation subject lessons to include recap and retention strategies like the use of mind maps, learning journey prompts and quizzes. In assemblies, it is explained to the pupils about their teachers’ recent ‘Walkthru’ training and the changes they may see in their school life as a result of this. This shows our pupils that just like them, the teachers are on a learning journey, always striving to know more and do better.
To find out more about our teaching and learning policy and the Teching Walkthrus please visit: https://www.walkthrus.co.uk/
