We are clear about what we want our curriculum to achieve. We work as a cohesive team to develop children who are ready for the world beyond Kensworth, ensuring that they learn and progress in the sense of knowing more, remembering more and being able to do more.

Teaching at Kensworth is designed to help our pupils to remember long term what they have been taught and to integrate new knowledge into larger ideas. Our curriculum is therefore designed around central themes linked to core texts as we know “our brains privilege story” (D.T.Willingham). Our curriculum is clearly organised. It is built upon strong adult-pupil relationships and memorable learning. High-impact features of curriculum implementation such as appropriate challenge and plenty of practice opportunities with diagnostic feedback are the cornerstones of our work.

We are passionate about developing oracy and a key focus at our school is on the modelling of language, fuelled by the use of stories and other high quality texts. Children love to use long words. We build on this curiosity and fascination by explicitly teaching subject specific vocabulary (tier 3 vocabulary) alongside more functional language (tier 1 and 2 vocabulary). We pay close attention to this because tier 3 vocabulary is at the heart of opening up important concepts for the children. Even children who find speaking most challenging are able to make great gains in learning using explicitly taught language.

Central to our curriculum are the needs and character of our community. As a small school serving a vibrant community, our curriculum is represented as a two year rolling programme. This ensures that our pupils learn about big ideas such as democracy in history throughout their time with us. We teach them to embed key concepts in their long term memory and apply them fluently. We welcome our parents as partners in the learning process and endeavour to provide them with the resources and confidence to make valuable contributions to their children’s journey here at Kensworth.

While much thought is given to planning and teaching, we are relentless in our quest to know how much and how well our children are learning. We use research based practice to find out how effective teaching has been as we look for the gaps, carry out timely and powerful interventions and reflect on how our quality first teaching can be further enhanced in the future.