Our Mission
‘Be your BEST self and reach for the stars!’
Our Vision
Seascape Primary School is committed to improving outcomes for all pupils through delivering a broad and balanced curriculum, which is dynamic, fun and meaningful, in a safe, secure and stimulating learning environment with high standards and expectations.
The curriculum aims to develop lifelong skills, and enable all pupils to be resilient, respectful, independent and successful citizens of the future.
Our Ethos
We believe that all children should experience the feeling of accomplishment in a wide range of areas. Our curriculum inspires children to ‘Be your BEST self and reach for the stars!’ – Seascape Primary School is committed to improving outcomes for all pupils!
At Seascape Primary school, careful analysis and discussion about our pupils’ backgrounds, life experiences and culture has helped us to design a curriculum with three key priorities underpinning every subject area. We believe that by focusing on the following key priorities our children will be ready to successfully meet the challenges of the next stage of their education and their lives.
Our curriculum priorities are:
Aspirations – we aim to provide experiences which show children the wide range of possibilities available for their future.
Initiative – we aim to offer experiences which help them to become independent and resourceful learners.
Environment – we aim to provide experiences which help our pupils value their environment and understand their responsibilities towards sustaining their local and global environment.
We have designed and planned our curriculum to offer a range of experiences which contribute to every child receiving a full and rich curriculum. The range of experiences we offer support and champion our culture and ensures that our children benefit from a full range of academic, spiritual, moral, social and cultural activities. These activities enrich their lives and those of our whole school community and make them proud of their British values and diverse society to which belong and play an active part. We are proud that our curriculum gives our children the skills, confidence and self-belief to lead a happy and fulfilled life by encouraging them to aim high and work towards their goals and dreams in life.
At Seascape Primary school, it is our underlying belief that every child should feel valued and experience the feeling of success in a wide range of curriculum areas. We believe that through the curriculum we can impact on what is in children’s head and how they feel about themselves, so that they feel clever, confident and ready to tackle any challenge they may face.
We have designed, organised and planned our curriculum to ensure every child receives an appropriate mix of academic and personal development which means that in practice our curriculum places equal importance on core and foundation subjects.
At Seascape Primary school, we place high priority on ensuring children’s physical and mental wellbeing are met. We understand that children will not be successful learners unless they are emotionally secure, therefore we carefully design our curriculum and adopt a flexible approach to timetabling to ensure that we can meet and respond to any issues which may arise. Children’s physical and mental wellbeing are as valued and important as academic development.
We carefully monitor children’s progress with their personal development and our well planned and thoughtful approach to personal development and SMSC helps to ensure that every child is well cared for and supported.
Our balanced approach to the curriculum is not at the expense of high standards in core subject areas. High standards and enabling children to reach national expectations and above is of vital importance if they are to succeed at the next stage of their education and go on to achieve full and happy lives and careers.
Our full and rich curriculum, with its excellent range of experiences, ensures that every pupil at Stanley Crook Primary School makes excellent progress both academically and personally. Our unique curriculum ensures that every child is given the opportunity to shine and flourish.
Intent
At Seascape Primary School we want our children to experience:
- A curriculum that has foundational knowledge, communication and language, vocabulary and reading at the heart of learning
- A curriculum that helps children to know how to live healthy lifestyles – both physically and mentally
- A rich curriculum that enables pupils to see the world beyond their locality
- A curriculum where knowledge underpins and enables the application of skills
- Opportunities to embed basic skills
- Resilience, perseverance, challenge and support so they have the confidence to aim high and aspire to more
- Spiritual, moral, social and cultural experiences threaded through all we do which will facilitate our pupils’ future
Implementation
As a school we advocate a consistent approach to teaching and learning, strongly informed by research evidence into what works in the classroom. We recognise the importance of personalising learning to the needs of individual children and classes. Our focus is upon all children in our classes making maximum progress across the curriculum.
Early Excellence forms the basis of our approach with nursery and reception and key stage one. We believe that children learn through play and new experiences and we strive to offer this through high quality, open ended resources which are accessible to all children. As a school we strive to develop independent children, who take pride in their own learning by leading it their own way, knowing their voice and opinion is heard and by learning in a safe environment where risk taking is encouraged.
We are proud to be a ‘Read, Write, Inc’ school. As part of this, we use silent signals across the whole school in order to promote high levels of engagement and pace within all lessons.
English – CLPE
The English curriculum is based on CLPE (Centre for Literacy in Primary Education) and includes the Power of Reading programme. The Power of Reading explores the impact of high-quality literature on children’s reading engagement and attainment and develops understanding of the link between children’s reading and writing development.
The training and associated resources provide support to develop a whole-school English curriculum, with high-quality texts and creative teaching approaches at its heart. Through this approach, school will be empowered to cultivate a love of reading and writing, as well as raising achievement in literacy. The programme will also teach to the children how powerful reading can be both for children’s academic attainment and their wider learning and development.
The Power of Reading will also supports in developing an inclusive and progressive curriculum for English across school and enhance teacher subject knowledge of how reading and writing develop across the primary years.
Through utilising high-quality texts to plan comprehensive and engaging English lessons, with context-embedded opportunities to use and apply phonics, spelling and grammar, the programme provides strategies and approaches to increase children’s engagement and attainment in reading and writing.
Access to text recommendations, detailed teaching plans and curriculum maps for the whole school to access and use – along with CPD and training opportunities – will develops a culture of reading and writing for pleasure across all groups.
CLPE Reading and Writing Scales have also been introduced.
The Reading and Writing Scales describe the journeys that children make in order to become literate. The scales break down the complex and individual patterns of progress into accessible and informative scales.
The purpose of the scales is to help teachers to understand what progression looks like in reading and writing and they illustrate how schools and teachers can provide an environment that supports children’s development as readers and writers and to suggest some next steps so that teachers can plan in order to take children into the next phase of their development.
The pedagogy underpinning the scales and the Next Steps is grounded in a coherent theory of children’s language and literacy development, exemplified through research.
The scales are for progression and not summative assessment. They are designed to support and develop teacher subject knowledge in literacy development, not to set out a linear sequence of targets that children need to reach in order to move to the next phase.
By introducing these scales as a mechanism to support teacher understanding of what progression looks like in reading and writing – and to support teacher subject knowledge in the development of reading and writing – quality of teaching and learning and improvements to pupil outcomes will be evidenced.
The scales will also enable leaders and teachers to recognise and identify children’s very different learning styles within a common framework and to plan for varying needs of individual children, which will positively impact of progress across target groups.
The aims of the programme in school are to:
- enable children to make accelerated progress in reading and writing;
- impact on pupils who were previously reluctant to engage with literacy;
- narrow the achievement gap between SEND and non-SEND;
- narrow the gap between disadvantaged pupils and their peers;
- encourage children to read more often, at greater length and to talk more confidently about books
Already, the impact of these changes is clear, with reading and writing motivation and engagement increasing from start of year. In particular, the engagement of children with SEND in reading and writing has increased significantly with qualitative data evidencing positive gains in children’s focus and willingness to engage in learning around the text.
Maths – White Rose
The maths curriculum has moved from Big Maths to White Rose Maths to enhance a mastery approach to the teaching of maths. Resources will support teachers create maths lessons that meet all national curriculum guidelines in a fun, inclusive and age-appropriate way. The material is designed to support children as they have fun with maths, exploring everything from times tables and number bonds to money and multiplication, which will support in actions against current targets for improvements in maths.
The high quality resources of White Rose Maths will inspire children and reduce planning burden on teachers, giving them more time to prepare high quality and impactful lessons.
White Rose Maths uses a mastery approach to maths teaching. This is a research-driven teaching and learning method that meets the goals of the National Curriculum and current subject-specfic areas for improvement in school.
- Puts numbers first: schemes have number at their heart, because confidence with numbers is the first step to competency in the curriculum as a whole.
- Puts depth before breadth: reinforce knowledge again and again.
- Encourages collaboration: children can progress through the schemes as a group, supporting each other as they learn.
- Focuses on fluency, reasoning and problem solving: it gives children the skills they need to become competent mathematicians.
Impact
First and foremost we want to instil in our children a love of learning and an understanding that the learning is part of a journey they are on. We want them to feel safe, to express and celebrate their learning achievements and recognise their own personal and academic growth. We see this impact in:
Due to the rich curriculum we offer we expect to see improvements across:
- The engagement of pupils in lessons
- The profile of all subjects being raised in school
- Increased knowledge and skills of children year on year
- Broader experience
- An increased participation in lessons and activities
The impact of what we do and what the children achieve cannot always be measured in data sets and numbers so we always try to look holistically at the whole child. We consider our children as individuals who are facing future challenges and ultimately leave us high school ready having enjoyed and embraced their learning experiences along the way.