At Heymann Primary and Nursery School, we believe that the design of our curriculum ensures that:

  • All our pupils receive a broad, balanced and rich curriculum
  • It is inclusive and provides equal opportunities for all
  • It is bespoke to the needs of our children
  • It includes opportunities for enhanced experiences, including using the local area and visiting places further afield

Our curriculum is designed to recognise and continually build upon our children’s prior learning, provide first-hand learning experiences, incorporate opportunities to revisit, allow the children to develop interpersonal skills, build resilience and become creative, critical thinkers. It also ensures that there is an emphasis on the essential knowledge that children need in order to not only fully understand concepts, but also to enable them to apply the knowledge, offer informed explanations and make links and spot patterns. Our aim is to provide our children with the essential foundations for the next part of their educational journey and beyond.

Our curriculum is underpinned by our four key Curriculum Drivers and our Heymann Highway (see tab). Our Heymann Highway identifies 5 learning behaviours which we feel are key to enabling them to become socially mobile citizens of the future. Our 4 key drivers thread through the curriculum ensuring our values are embedded. Different aspects of the Heymann Highway are focussed on each half-term throughout all aspects of school life e.g. assembly certificates, learning activities in classrooms, lunchtime rewards. This creates explicit opportunities to recognise and develop these key life skills.

We have a broad and balanced curriculum which incorporates statutory requirements. This is planned and designed to meet the needs of our children, who come from a wide range of backgrounds and bring with them a wealth of different experiences. At its core is the National Curriculum which is enhanced by different opportunities and experiences bespoke to our children’s needs and their identified barriers to learning. Incorporated into our curriculum we have designed 2-year cycle of themed weeks to enhance our provision and experiences for children which allow them to apply their knowledge and their learning behaviours, and embed our key drivers

In all subjects, each year group has pre-identified knowledge and skills to learn, which are built on year-on-year. Each subject is delivered discreetly, and most subjects are based on a series of enquiry questions to develop specific knowledge and skills we have identified as important that all children should know. More detailed information for each subject can be found in each individual subject tab.

A crucial element of our curriculum is the use of knowledge organisers for Geography, History and Science. A knowledge organiser (KO) sets out the important, useful and powerful knowledge for a topic on a single page. Their purpose is to provide an organised foundation of the factual knowledge needed in a particular unit of work and facilitate our pupils being able to retrieve and apply this new knowledge. These are shared with the children and parents at the beginning of a topic. We also plan in spaced retrieval opportunities to transfer key learning from pupils’ short term to long term memory.

We plan opportunities for our children to know about keeping safe and we also plan and promote British Values. Nurture is an important part of our school values; we want our children to be able to lead a safe and healthy life; become responsible citizens and respect themselves, others and the environment. Community involvement is an essential part of our curriculum as we celebrate and develop an understanding of a wide range of traditions that represent our school community.

We know that our children enjoy their curriculum through our conversation with them, from our observations of learning which show us that our children are highly motivated, enthused and engaged in their learning and by monitoring their achievements and progress.

We use a range of assessments, retrieval strategies and observation techniques to ensure that our children are retaining the knowledge and skills taught to them and applying this to new learning. We analyse our data to identify misconceptions and gaps in learning so that we can fill those gaps and see our children fulfil their potential.

We review our curriculum regularly to make sure that it meets the needs of our children, to check that it is relevant and challenging and still excites our children. We want our children to leave our school, with confidence, able to make connections, with the skills to make decisions, to be able to work both independently and in team, self-evaluate and be motivated to want to be life-long learners.

f you require any more details, please get in contact with our school office: office@heymann.notts.sch.uk