Curriculum Overview

Highfield Community Primary School aspires to deliver a creative, inclusive, challenging and real-world curriculum that motivates future thinkers, innovators and problem solvers in an environment that stimulates and supports high quality learning. 

Through our curriculum we aim to ensure that children develop key learning skills and knowledge for future learning and life experience. Our goal is for the children of Highfield Community Primary School to be equipped with the skills and knowledge that will enable them to: problem solve, communicate, reflect, be curious and creative, articulate, analyse and evaluate and collaborate effectively.

Like all schools in England, we must follow the National Curriculum. It sets out subjects and content which we must teach. Within this, however, there is flexibility so that we can interpret and plan to meet the needs and interests of our children now and for the future. The key aim for all our teaching and learning is to provide opportunities for all pupils to learn, to enjoy and to achieve. This includes: 

Knowledge and Skills

Both knowledge and skills have an important purpose, and the best curricula ensure the right balance of both. Knowledge and skills are inseparable – you really can't have one without the other. At Highfield Community Primary School, we design progressive learning experiences that help children acquire the knowledge and skills they need and then give them opportunities to apply this in new and interesting ways. 

Communication

Communication is a two-way process. We communicate ‘outwards’ by speaking and writing, and we receive communication by listening and reading. In all our teaching and learning, we aim for our pupils to communicate orally to a high level, and so we place a lot of emphasis on all forms of speaking and listening, as well as reading and writing. In this increasingly information-based world, we also want our learners to evaluate information critically rather than believe everything they come across without questioning. 

Working with others

Working with others is a life-skill that will help to prepare our pupils for their future. Just like adults, children need to be able to cooperate and compromise, agree and sometimes constructively disagree, help others to learn and learn from others. We ensure that many of our lessons incorporate these skills.

Problem-Solving and Thinking Skills

Another aim of our teaching is to build children’s confidence to investigate and find solutions to problems and to think for themselves. There are many ways to build up skills in this area. For example, we might do this through lots of positive reinforcement and encouragement, teaching step-by-step problem-solving techniques, and indirectly by using role-play or other realistic problems to reach agreement.