Spaldwick Primary School

Where every day is a chance to learn and succeed

Introduction

Spaldwick Primary School is a small, rural school situated on the outskirts of Huntingdon in Cambridgeshire.

There are currently 87 children on roll, split into four classes: Reception, Year 1/2, Year 3/4 and Year 5/6.

With a predominantly White British demographic and just a handful of EAL children, most children travel to school by bus from local villages. Located in the commuter belt for Cambridge and London. Spaldwick is a school with a tangible family feel and a real sense of community, set within enviable grounds.

Intent

At Spaldwick, we know our children well and do what we believe is right for them in every aspect of school life, including designing and implementing a curriculum that is best suited to their needs. We want to provide them with a curriculum that is highly relevant, challenging and that will raise their levels of resilience and independence. We aim to offer a wide range of inspiring, engaging and practical learning experiences, developing cultural capital through planned activities, such as residential trips, museum visits, and teaching them about human creativity and achievement. We want their learning to be diverse, holistic, and purposeful, tapping into their strengths, such as hard work and curiosity, as well as addressing their weaknesses.

 
We also want our school values – Pride, Independence, Enjoyment, Resilience and Care to be reflected in our curriculum model. 

We are committed to an inclusive approach, that ensures consistency, cohesion and progression. We believe each child’s learning journey should be enjoyable, fun and exciting, evidencing clear achievement and acquisition of skills, knowledge and attitudes.

Rationale for Implementation

We use Dimensions ‘Learning Means the World’ Curriculum as the vehicle for changing our pupils’ hearts, as well as their minds. This curriculum is underpinned by four highly relevant world issues, known as the four Cs:

• Culture
• Communication                                                         
• Conflict
• Conservation

Culture

As a school that predominantly represents a white British demographic, with little personal experience of other ethnic groups, we want our children to fully appreciate and embrace cultural diversity, learning about and experiencing a range of different cultural and faith heritages.

We want them to value diversity, understand the roots and importance of cultural heritage and to behave in a respectful and tolerant way towards others, regardless of faith, ethnicity or background. We actively and explicitly promote cross-cultural friendship, respect, tolerance and understanding through ‘Learning Means the World’.

Communication

We want our children to be able to show empathy, improve their ability to listen to their peers, responding sensitively by offering their support. We want them to be able to accept that others may have differing opinions to theirs and we also want them to be able to express their feelings and emotions better. We believe that a focus on communication is key to this.

Our curriculum provides lots of opportunities for our children to develop their language and vocabulary, thus enabling them to articulate their learning, express themselves clearly in discussion, debate and presentation, as well as enabling collaboration and exchange of ideas.

We want our children to be thoughtful, effective and considerate communicators, learning to take account of context, audience and setting.

Conflict

We believe that life skills should be taught throughout the curriculum and an understanding of responsible, respectful behaviour is an important aspect of learning. Having a developed understanding of sources of conflict and the importance of seeing things from others’ points of view, we believe, will make a difference to their own choices as they learn more about conflict resolution. We want our children to be able to keep things in proportion, have a real awareness of how their behaviour affects others and how important positive relationships are throughout life. We also want them to be able to put into action conflict resolution and modify their own behaviour to help them disagree in a constructive manner.

Conservation

The school has recently had an energy re-fit, in an attempt to become eco-friendlier. We are also looking at becoming a hub for recycling locally. However, we feel our children will benefit from the more structured approach to developing awareness and appreciation of local, national and global sustainability issues and initiatives that ‘Learning Means the World’ offers. We want our children to be more informed about conservation issues, to care passionately about our world and to engage actively in being a change for good, both now and in the future.