The Oakmeadow Way

At Oakmeadow, our curriculum aims to develop the whole person as we know this is essential for children to thrive. It is underpinned by our aims, values and purpose: to provide coherent, ambitious and inspirational learning so our children become life-long learners. Our curriculum will provide our children with knowledge, skills and understanding to succeed in life.

We have worked hard as a staff to personalise our curriculum so that it meets the needs of the children here at Oakmeadow. Personalised learning to us is about understanding and knowing our children, their needs and interests and then tailoring our provision to these to ensure that every pupil has an intrinsic desire to achieve and reach their star potential. We have therefore developed a curriculum around 5 drivers of Resilience, Culture, Diversity, Community and Environment. Furthermore, we strongly believe that the curriculum is a never-ending story, as there will always be something that we want to refine, ditch or add depth to. Our staff believe in the idea that curriculum work is a living, breathing process.

As a school, we feel that areas surrounding personal, social. spiritual, cultural, mental and physical development should form the heart of our curriculum and that all other learning should stem from this, as fundamentally we are a school that values the wellbeing of our children and their ability to handle life and learning situations as they grow. We believe that a good curriculum ensures that pupils have access to knowledge that will enable them to make informed decisions about their wellbeing, health and relationships. We build Relationship and Sex Education into our taught curriculum as well as providing opportunities to explore living life in modern Britain and the values that active and positive citizens demonstrate. We believe that our curriculum offers our children the necessary discussions and experiences in order to help them understand life in the wider world so that children leave us able to appreciate diversity, different cultures, are resilient and who are adaptable to change.

We plan for challenge to be present in all lessons and our children are taught that mistakes are good because we learn from them.  Our curriculum enables children to be reflective learners who think about not only what knowledge they have acquired but how they went about learning it and the skills they used. It enables our children to be active learners, who engage in teamwork and problem solving to develop their knowledge and skills.  Where possible, we ensure that contexts for learning are tailored to our local area and community.  Our rich array of extra-curricular opportunities also allow children to discover their talents and interests beyond the classroom.

 

How to find out more information about our curriculum:

  • Curriculum coherence
  • Curriculum planning
  • Vocabulary across the curriculum
  • Knowledge organisers
  • Enrichment
  • Curriculum subject leadership
  • Year-group pathways:  on these pages you will be able to find out more about the knowledge and skills that are taught in each year group for every subject area, and how these progress as a child moves through the school.

 

Curriculum coherence

Our curriculum is intentionally a knowledge rich curriculum, as we believe children need substantive and disciplinary knowledge to be able to understand, remember and apply their learning. The curriculum promotes long-term learning, and we believe that progress means knowing more and remembering more.  As pupils learn the content of the curriculum, they are making progress. We have developed a curriculum built on current research regarding how memory works to ensure that children not only have access to 'the best that has been thought and said' but are taught this in a way that ensures children can remember the curriculum content in future years.

The curriculum is designed and organised in discrete subject pathways so that each subject’s substantive knowledge and disciplinary knowledge are placed at the heart of the curriculum.  The subject pathways create the conditions for pupils to learn the concepts that come up again and again – the unifying ideas of each discipline.  Then we look across subjects to make meaningful connections, as we understand that knowledge pays off when it is conceptual and when the facts are related to one another. We deliver this curriculum through topics which have been carefully selected by staff because we feel that they will interest and excite the children, and that the concepts within them will benefit and be of relevance to the children here.