Curriculum Information

At Mowmacre Hill Primary School, our vision is to create a primary school that encourages its children to question and discover for themselves. Questioning and discovering their personal potential, their responsibilities in the Mowmacre school family, the Mowmacre community and as international citizens. We aspire to help each child to realise their potential to become successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens, effective contributors and curious young people who are confident to challenge the status quo.

As Mowmacre Hill staff, we endeavour to guide and inspire our children through innovative and excellent teaching practices, which reflect and respond to the children’s individual starting points. A mastery approach to teaching and learning has been adopted across all areas of the curriculum. Staff have the opportunity to work closely with leaders to identify how lessons reflect the children’s previous learning and aspirational future outcomes. Achievement and attainment across our ambitious curriculum are closely monitored through assessment, moderation and learning conversations however, equal importance is placed on the assessment and monitoring of children’s emotional and social needs. Our wellbeing team of professionals work closely with all staff to ensure that our pupils and their family’s needs are identified and supported both in school and through careful signposting to specialist external agencies.

As part of the Discovery Schools Academy Trust, we benefit from being part of a forward thinking academic organisation and have access to facilities and opportunities beyond an individual school’s scope.

The Mowmacre Primary School Leadership Team drive curriculum implementation through frequent meetings and liaison with subject leaders. Subject development is planned and actioned collaboratively. Mowmacre Hill has benefited from the development of school specific initiatives led by the Lead Practitioners of Discovery Schools Academy Trust (DSAT) and through the completion of nationally recognised leadership programmes led in partnership with Inspiring Leaders and DSAT. The school has adopted a mastery approach to learning which ensures that children consolidate their learning before acquiring new knowledge and considers the key approaches of metacognition.

The teaching team have collaborated on producing the ‘Mowmacre Hill Primary School Progression Documents’. The documents identify and track the key assessment statements across each subject area and across the primary curriculum. English writing skills have been identified in the MHPS ‘Pebbles and breadcrumbs’ documents. ‘Maths No Problem’ is used to ensure coverage and depth of curriculum needed in the area of mathematics. These documents are used to develop subject leader’s knowledge of how skills develop in relation to chronological and individual starting points, assessment and monitoring of subjects and curriculum moderation and will enable leaders to hold ‘meaningful discussions about how they know that the curriculum is having an impact.’ Clear identification of subject specific skills allows teachers to develop their teaching pedagogy to utilise the key elements of rehearsal, encoding and retrieval strategies; in order to enable working memory acquisition.

Wherever plausible, links are made between subject areas to ensure understanding and the contextual application of skills. Leaders and teaching staff have worked together to plan for ‘quality outcome’ led learning. Teachers follow the planning sequence recommended in the research report Beyond Levels: alternative approaches developed by teaching schools (DfE 2014).

‘Successful pedagogy involves thinking about the relationship between individual lessons and longer term outcomes. Too frequently lessons fail because they have been designed backwards ie resources, activities, learning intentions and then success criteria. What the project crystallised in all participant thinking was the necessity to plan in the opposite way ie success criteria, learning intentions, activities that deepened thinking and resources.‘

The assessment of the wider curriculum uses a whole class assessment process, which enables ‘in the moment’ assessment recorded on a working document: this enables assessment to be used to address misconceptions immediately and before any new learning. The approach also minimises excessive marking load, which had previously had a minimal impact.

Ultimately, the impact of Mowmacre Hill curriculum will be preparing children to be academically, mentally and physically prepared for life in high school, in Modern Britain and as worldwide citizens. Children at MHPS have a vast range of starting points; the purpose planned curriculum aims to prepare children to succeed in their individual life journeys. No child is left behind and through careful considerations of experiences both academically and socially, teachers craft personalised curriculum for their classes, cohorts and the school community as a whole. Monitoring and feedback is carried out through the triangulation of evidence of work in the children’s books, learning conversations, teacher knowledge and assessment data. Assessment data is validated through moderation and scrutinised during periodical ‘data parties’ to ensure accuracy. Data will be compared to both age related expectations and SEN milestones (Pivats). . Feedback practises at Mowmacre Hill ensure sustained progress whilst minimising unnecessary work load for staff; teachers and children to become creators of an effective and purposeful learning journey; to standardise feedback principles for all staff and to develop children’s meta-cognition skills to be owners of their own learning and not passive consumers of teachers’ comments. Working walls are present in all classrooms, which include clear ‘Learning Journeys’ to empower pupils to be able to envisage and explain the path of their learning and how it develops over time. Learning is both scaffolded and contextual in order for children to be able to commit their learning experiences to their long term memories and to utilise current research in metacognition practice. Whole class feedback initiatives allow teachers use evidence of pupils’ learning to feed into their planning and adaptation of the curriculum, both collectively and individually. Subject leaders and the leadership team of Mowmacre Hill regularly evaluate the progression of skills in the core and foundation subjects in order to adapt and improve the impact of the curriculum.

Our curriculum has been designed with P.S.H.E. at its heart, giving the children the tools to become citizens of the future. It is based around 5 drivers taught across the school. These are: 

These themes are taught in engaging ways, incorporating the national curriculum and some further Mowmacre Hill personalised aspects of enquiry where appropriate. All topics are based on the children’s previous knowledge, interests and starting points are collated before each topic is planned.

As a whole school, we provide a creative curriculum which has been collaboratively formulated by the Mowmacre Hill staff. Staff have collated and quality assured National Curriculum progression documents which allow staff to consult and refer to the skills taught in previous years in order to consolidate and build upon these.

A medium term plan is then formulated which makes explicit the prior learning, intended learning, activities, metacognition tools and tasks, vocabulary and destinations (end product).

Each sequence of learning has an enquiry line which is referred to at the beginning of each lesson. The destination (end product) is explicit, as are the stations of learning that will be taught in order to reach the destination.

Each station (lesson or series of lessons) has an access route which makes explicit any challenge or considerations that will be used in order to enable the children to achieve the intended learning.