Curriculum overview and letters 2022-2023
The Skylark Federation is undergoing the process of redesigning its curriculum.
See below for a video briefly outlining our curriculum redesign journey so far, for a working draft of our 3-year curriculum cycle in History, and for a letter briefly outlining the main changes in our curriculum programme from last academic year.
You will also find our curriculum statement outlining the schemes we follow and the break down of our year groups.
Curriculum Overview Statement
Our curriculum is built around our children. We follow the National Curriculum which is a blueprint used by schools to ensure that teaching standards are consistent. Schools are free to plan how the National Curriculum fits with their particular strengths and introduce other activities that extend the learning experience for their pupils. The National Curriculum sets out the most important knowledge and skills that every child has a right to learn.
Our school is blocked into three main areas:
Hedgehogs Class - Foundation Stage
Squirrels Class - Key Stage One (in some years, a small number of Year 2 children will be part of Badgers Class)
Badgers Class, Foxes Class, Owls Class - Key Stage Two
As part of the National Curriculum the children in Key Stage One and Key Stage Two are taught compulsory subjects including: English, Mathematics, Phonics, Science, Design Technology, Computing, History, Geography, Art and Design, Music, PE and French. All schools also have to teach RE, though parents have the right to withdraw children for all or part of the RE curriculum. In addition, we teach Personal, Social and Health Education. Every child in Year 3 receives extra music tuition from an ESCC Music Service specialist. Our parents receive regular curriculum letters from our Class Teachers.
At Barcombe, we use the Rocket Phonics SSP programme. Rocket Phonics is a systematic synthetic phonics programme that has been written by phonics experts. It includes a combination of digital and printed resources, and two fully matched series of decodable reading books. The reading books we use have been carefully designed to appeal to the tastes and interests of children who are starting out on their reading journey. They include a variety of fiction and non-fiction, and have been carefully devised to provide practice and application of phonics knowledge and skills in full alignment with the classroom lessons.
In regards to the wider curriculum, we currently have a project-based approach to our curriculum with the main focus being History in terms 1 & 2, Geography in terms 3 & 4 and the Arts in terms 5 &6.
We are committed to creative learning opportunities and learning outside the classroom whenever and wherever we can. Our learning projects are organised on a three year rolling programme and coverage of the National Curriculum is ensured in a way that is accessible and enjoyable for our children.
Please see our whole school rolling curriculum and the individual subject curriculum statements to find out more.