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Achieve, Celebrate, Succeed

The Kennington Curriculum

Curriculum Intent

Our Vision


I have come in order that you might have life-life in all its fullness. John 10:10

We are an inclusive community where Christian values empower us. With God’s guidance, we work with pride and passion to create life-long learners who fulfil their potential. If we work together, we will be the very best that we can be: achieving, celebrating and succeeding whilst having fun.

Our school vision is deeply rooted in our Christian ethos with Jesus’ promise of ‘life in all its fullness’ at its heart.  Derived from this commitment and designed for our children, our curriculum encompasses the four key areas of The Church of England’s Vision for Education (2016) and is reflective of our shared commitment to the common good of the whole community:

Educating for wisdom, knowledge and skills: enabling discipline, confidence and delight in seeking wisdom and knowledge, and developing talents in all areas of life.

Educating for hope and aspiration: enabling healing, repair and renewal, coping wisely when things go wrong, opening horizons and guiding people into ways of fulfilling them.

Educating for community and living well together: a core focus on relationships, participation in communities and the qualities of character that enable people to flourish together.

Educating for dignity and respect: the basic principle of respect for the value and preciousness of each person, treating each person as a unique individual of inherent worth.

(The Church of England Vision for Education, 2016)

As an academy we have the freedom to develop our own curriculum which is bespoke to the needs of our pupils whilst still meeting the breadth and depth of the National Curriculum. The aim of our curriculum is for pupils to have the requisite skills to be successful, independent and motivated learners in readiness for the next stage of their education and beyond.

At Kennington we offer a curriculum which is broad and balanced and which builds on the disciplinary and substantive knowledge of all children, whatever their starting point. Our curriculum incorporates the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum 2014 and builds on the curriculum in place at Downs View Infant School.  In addition, our curriculum offers other opportunities which best meet the learning and developmental needs of the pupils in our school.

We believe that all children should experience success and have experience of accomplishment. Our curriculum therefore provides an excellent mix of academic and personal development; it recognises the value of paying equal importance to core and foundation subjects and physical and mental wellbeing are both valued, understood and prioritised.

Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, along with a well-planned and structured programme of personal development underpins all of our work and is monitored as closely as the academic subjects. We carefully balance the requirement of pupils to reach national expectations in core subjects, with our wider curriculum aims of providing a full spectrum of thoughtful and enriching experiences. As much as we value the progress and fulfilment of our pupils academically, we strive to offer them a rich and varied arts and sports curriculum too.

Our curriculum is thematic and allows our children to explore different subject areas via enquiry-based questions. These themes are relevant and engaging and offer opportunities for our children to pursue their own ideas, make progress and develop a broad set of transferable skills. The themes are responsive to current global issues, representative of the diversity of our school community and the locality of the school and are reviewed regularly.  

We believe learning is the widening and deepening of essential disciplinary and substantive knowledge and development of learning behaviours. To ensure this our teaching sequences have spaced repetition to gain a deeper and more meaningful understanding of the matters, skills and processes within subjects.

Our curriculum is motivating, engaging and taught through with an emphasis on creative and critical thinking, oracy, questioning, research and reasoning. Wherever possible, we use visits and visitors to help deliver the curriculum in a stimulating and exciting way.

Our curriculum celebrates diversity and utilises the skills, knowledge and cultural wealth of our community along with supporting the spiritual, moral, social and cultural development of all pupils. It is our aim that all children in our school are able to feel represented in our curriculum through the people that they study, the books that they read and the stories that they hear. Units of learning have been carefully chosen to provide our children with opportunity to enquire, challenge and gain a deeper understanding of what is right and just in our world today.

At Kennington CE Academy we want our children to experience:

•    A curriculum that has knowledge and language at the heart of their learning.
•    A rich curriculum that enables children to see the world from a wide range of perspectives.
•    A curriculum which is underpinned by knowledge and enables the application of skills.
•  Opportunities to embed basic skills and demonstrate knowledge in a variety of ways; then moving on with learning.
•    Developing resilience, perseverance, challenge and support so they have the confidence to aim high and aspire to more.
•    Opportunities to deepen their learning and build on skills progressively each year.

Curriculum Implementation

At Kennington we plan a cross-curricular approach to the curriculum, with high quality texts to inspire discussion, support the development of reading and provide writing opportunities within each subject.

We provide a balance of directed and enquiry led approaches to learning, with written and practical work embedded.

We utilise our local community as a valuable resource for learning and thread links into the curriculum across each year group. Using the outdoors as a classroom is fundamental to our values and this can be school based or as an enrichment opportunity to other locations.

Units of learning across our curriculum are carefully mapped across each year group to ensure that children build on prior knowledge and are able to find opportunities to make connections between different areas of learning as well as developing a range of enquiry and critical thinking skills.

For English and Mathematics, teachers follow the programmes of study in the 2014 National Curriculum specific to each year group.

We use White Rose to support maths planning and Little Wandle Letters and Sounds for phonics.

We are dedicated to ensuring that every child is a reader and reading is explicitly taught through a wide range of exciting tasks and texts during daily guided reading sessions. Our Accelerated Reader programme supports children to read for meaning and further develops their ability to retrieve and infer information within the text.

We are passionate about writing and using KS2 picture books as a vehicle to inspire writers. Children are given a purposeful stimulus and audience which promotes and encourages creativity. We explore and re-craft ideas, honing our skills with teacher feedback. Finally, children present their finished pieces to an audience for celebration, review and evaluation.

Our curriculum also promotes wellbeing with a wide range of opportunities for personal development. We use Jigsaw to support our PSHE curriculum which also supports the delivery of the statutory requirements for RSE.

Throughout each unit of learning, we aim to enrich the cultural capital of all pupils, particularly those from less advantaged backgrounds, through our choices of text and other resources, visits and visitors, vocabulary development and use of technology. We actively seek to engage less advantaged families in all aspects of school life, including attending trips, other school events and pupil and parent voice.

We currently direct a significant proportion of our Sports Premium funding into providing enrichment activities for all pupils, which includes a range of trips and experiences. Pupils in Year 4 all learn a tuned instrument in addition to the music skills introduced through our thematic curriculum.  

To support our model of Instructional Coaching for teacher development, we have researched and created a Teaching and Learning Strategy Handbook which supports teachers and support staff to use evidence-informed practices to provide the very best experiences for our children. We are constantly developing our pedagogy so that it remains pupil focussed and with high expectations of all children, including disadvantaged pupils and pupils with SEND.

Curriculum Impact

At Kennington we assess pupils across all curriculum subjects. For English and Maths, we capture assessment information three times each year using the. We carry out regular moderation sessions in-school, with Downs View Infant School, across the Trust and beyond to quality assure our assessment judgements.

For RE, we capture assessment information weekly and for all other foundation subjects, we assess pupil outcomes at the end of each curriculum unit.

Assessment information is utilised during pupil focus meetings to inform future planning, to identify pupils requiring additional intervention and to ensure that pupils are making expected or above expected progress from their own starting point. Senior and middle leaders, including our SENCo, also use assessment data to identify gaps in teaching and skills across the school and to inform school development priorities and actions. This information is also used to assess the impact of provision on disadvantaged pupils with those with additional needs and to plan effective and timely intervention. Class teachers also use assessment information to adapt planning to ensure that it meets the needs of all pupils.

Formative assessment is used effectively in lessons to provide class teachers with point-of-learning assessment information, through which to adapt teaching, address misconceptions and provide children with knowledge of what they have achieved and what they need to do next.

The impact of our curriculum cannot be measured in numbers alone, so we always look holistically at each child. We consider each child as an individual who may face different challenges at different times.