At Easebourne CE Primary School, our curriculum is designed to inspire and equip our pupils with the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to thrive in an ever-changing world. We are committed to fostering a love of learning, creativity, curiosity, and cultural awareness in every child, ensuring they develop into well-rounded, confident, and resilient individuals. Our Christian values of faith, hope and love, underpin all aspects of school life, promoting a caring, nurturing, and inclusive environment that celebrates diversity.
Core Principles
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Holistic Development: Our broad and balanced curriculum supports the academic, social, emotional, spiritual and cultural growth of our pupils. We nurture individual talents, promoting an inclusive approach.
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High Expectations: We encourage pupils to strive for excellence, valuing individuality and equipping them with self-discipline and confidence.
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Lifelong Learning: We instill a passion for learning through engaging, memorable experiences tailored to pupils' needs and interests.
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Community and Collaboration: We foster a collaborative community, valuing parents, carers and the wider community in supporting learning.
Curriculum Design
Our curriculum is carefully sequenced to develop pupils' knowledge, understanding and skills in a progressive and coherent way. We utilise spaced repetition to reinforce key concepts, ensuring pupils retain learning over time. New knowledge and skills build upon prior learning through structured revisiting of content.
Curriculum Implementation
The Early Years staff work in the community to ensure a nurturing environment where every child feels safe and can thrive. By conducting ‘Stay and Plays’, Nursery Visits and Home Visits in the Summer before children start with us, we can learn about each child as an individual and tailor what we do in the Autumn Term and beyond to develop each child academically, socially, emotionally, spiritually and culturally.
The Early Years staff introduce new themes to provide inspiration for learning, whilst providing the flexibility for children to follow their own interests and ideas. We are keen to bring the community into school to share their skills and knowledge with the children, as well as tailoring some of our themes to help the children understand their community more. Using the ‘Characteristics of Effective Learning’ to support us, we help children understand how to learn and equip them with the skills they will need as lifelong learners. Children learn through a balance of child-initiated and adult-directed activities and our themes are supported by a range of quality key texts.
The timetable is carefully structured so that children have whole class directed teaching, adult led individual and small group work and free choice time and this is adapted throughout the year to take into consideration the changing needs of the children. The whole class enjoy robustly planned Phonics (incorporating reading and writing), maths and theme based inputs every day.
Reading is at the heart of our curriculum and our aim is to encourage a love of reading, right from the start. We follow the ‘Little Wandle Letters and Sounds’ programme to ensure consistency throughout the school and our on-site nursery uses the same scheme to build the foundations of phonics. Pupils start getting phonics lessons in Week 2 of their ‘Easebourne Journey’, ensuring we are striving for excellence with the children’s reading from the very beginning of the year. Children are encouraged to read at home and practice regularly in school. They are given fully decodable books that match their phonic knowledge in order for them to apply their learning with the aim of becoming successful, confident and fluent readers.
The whole school uses the White Rose Maths Scheme as small steps to guide the children through their learning journey. Pupils learn through using concrete manipulatives and pictorial representations which are then rehearsed, applied and recorded within their own child-led exploration and individual / small group activities.
The individual and small group work means the Early Years staff can systematically check for understanding, identify and respond to misconceptions quickly and provide real-time verbal feedback which results in a strong impact on the children’s acquisition of new learning.
We believe that quality play is a vehicle for learning. Children are provided with plenty of time to engage in Free Choice time throughout the day. Our environment is enhanced with a variety of exciting, purposeful and contextual resources, experiences and activities which are carefully planned for our inside and outdoor areas to engage and challenge the children’s learning. We also provide the children with a huge range of resources throughout the year which the children have free choice access to provide them with opportunities for their own child-initiated activities. We focus on making every interaction a quality one by intervening at the right time with the right tools, so every interaction is an intervention.
Children are encouraged to employ subject specific language and terminology throughout their learning and such vocabulary will be modelled orally by supporting adults. The Early Years staff ensure that interactions are positive and progressive, allowing children to flourish and gather words at pace in order to become confident communicators.
Every child deserves the best possible start to their schooling and the support that enables them to fulfil their full potential. Our inclusive approach means that all children learn together, so we have a range of additional intervention and support for children who may not be reaching their potential or are showing a greater depth of understanding and need further challenge. This includes sessions for developing speech and language, attention and turn taking, fine motor skills, phonics, and mathematics.