Our Curriculum

Curriculum Context

• We aim to offer a curriculum that is exciting, engaging and highly motivational.
• We want to develop learning through fun and memorable experiences. Our creative approach is designed to nurture our pupils, so they become more independent, achieve well and become more confident, well-rounded individuals.
• With this in mind, we have implemented a cohesive, sequential curriculum model built around human flourishing, through which we aspire to embed a culture of success. It encourages pupils to develop a broader vocabulary which enables them to discuss their learning, connect and progress, year on year, ready for their transition to secondary school.
• We believe our curriculum should look to raise pupils’ aspirations, by providing them with a wide range of practical learning experiences, developing their cultural capital, as well as teaching them about what is possible in terms of human creativity and achievement.
• We want our curriculum to provide our children with stimulating individual and team activities and competitions to promote the importance of having a lifetime of positive physical activity and well-being.
• We want to teach our children how to successfully recognise, analyse, reflect and manage their emotions and be able to proactively match suitable and appropriate behaviours to various situations and circumstances. We aim to explicitly explain and teach our children how to be emotionally resilient, how to respect themselves and others and how to live positive and fulfilled lives.
• We want to be able to send our pupils out into the world with developing employability skills. We want to open the doors of opportunity to each pupil, helping them to recognise the potential they have to make a positive contribution, not only within their own community, but on a national and global scale, so they can achieve amazing things.

Rationale for Implementation

Our Dimensions curriculum is underpinned by four highly relevant world issues, known as the four Cs.

Communication
Conflict
Culture
Conservation

• We primarily use Dimensions ‘Learning Means the World’ Curriculum as the main vehicle for achieving our outlined intent but we reserve the right to suspend the Dimensions Curriculum in order to take account, commemorate or celebrate important local, community, national, global events and projects.
• We may also supplement the Dimensions Curriculum by incorporating specific and additional geography and science projects.
• We will also supplement our Dimensions curriculum, by threading through it, both PSHE and online safety information, activities and understanding.

Communication

• Developing language and vocabulary is a priority for us as a school, and we passionately believe that communication is key to accessing learning across the curriculum. Realising the need to appropriately communicate in a range of settings is vital for our children in developing positive relationships.
• We want our children to understand that our choice of words can have a profound impact on others, and we are committed to the goal of every child becoming articulate.
• We believe it is important for our pupils to feel they are heard and their opinions are valued and that they are actively encouraged to talk about their feelings. Our children need to feel valued, understand the consequences of their actions and choices, learn to get along and work together, developing their social skills.
• We also want our pupils to increase their understanding of language and have consistent access to high quality vocabulary. We feel the strong communication focus in this curriculum model best reflects our aspirations in this area for every pupil.
• We believe it is also important to communicate well with parents and develop good relationships. We’d like our parents to be involved in celebrating learning and we want pupils to be eager to talk to parents about this.

Conflict

• Our children need to understand and appreciate others’ opinions and develop the necessary skills to address and resolve conflict. By investigating conflict and understanding its impact, we aim to enable our pupils to show empathy towards others and their situations.
• We believe that it is vital that we establish a safe, positive and respectful learning environment for all our children. At a personal level, we want our children to be able to recognise emotions that lead to conflict and deal with these appropriately, understanding that asking for help can be part of the conflict resolution process. As a junior school, we take pupils from three different feeder schools with different approaches to behaviour management so it is important for us to ensure a consistent approach is embedded.

Culture

• At Ewanrigg, our pupils need to broaden their horizons to help them understand what life is like outside their locality and allow them the opportunities to know what is within their reach.
• As a predominantly White British school, our pupils need to have an awareness of other cultures, develop respect towards others and celebrate similarities and differences
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• We want to ensure our children have opportunities to experience what is happening in the wider world so it is important for us to provide specific, intentional learning opportunities, through this curriculum, to meet this aim.

Conservation

• We want our pupils to appreciate and benefit from and respect, all that our local area has to offer. We now for the first time ever, have a field on the school grounds and we are excited to be able to develop this area incorporating the ideas of the children where appropriate.
• We feel our children need a curriculum that highlights the importance of sustainability and respect for their local, national and global environments.
• We want our children to become responsible custodians of the future, through problem-solving, at a local, national and even global level and realise that they can really make a difference.
• Our curriculum narrative begins with Communication, as this underpins and links to the other three focus areas. Next, Conflict which has a focus on the past, specifically learning from mistakes. We have followed this with Culture, because we believe that understanding identity is so important. Finally, Conservation which looks to the future and a better, sustainable world.
• We also encourage our pupils to have high aspirations by teaching them about human creativity and achievement through additional Competency Units about famous figures that focus on Creativity, Commitment, Courage and Community.