Our Curriculum Intent
Our Curriculum Intent - The offer we make to all children who attend Ursula Taylor C of E School.
The curriculum offer at Ursula Taylor is ever evolving and changing to meet the needs of the children we serve. Our primary aim is to provide our children with the opportunities to acquire a rich knowledge base and embed key skills such as, thinking skills, research methods, investigative skills and the ability to work independently and in a team.
Alongside these important academic aspects, we place great importance on the development of our children's social, emotional and physical development. Through our embedded values programme and our distinctively Christian ethos, coupled with our work to develop children's cultural understanding we create a curriculum which is designed to foster curiosity, engagement and spark a love of learning.
The central spine running through our provision is the National Curriculum. We firmly believe that a curriculum needs rigour and it needs to be progressive in terms of coverage, knowledge and skill development. We also have a responsibility to ensure children are prepared to leave us at the end of Year 6 with the knowledge and learning to allow them to successfully transition into the next phase of their education.
There has been a great deal written in the media about SATs and we are acutely aware of our responsibility to ensure our children are well prepared for this experience. It is important that they are in the best possible position to do their best and demonstrate the tremendous progress they have made. However, we have made the clear decision to retain our topic based curriculum and to not narrow the curriculum and 'teach to the test'.
Our belief is that children learn best when they are immersed in a topic, allowed freedom to find out new things and have the flexibility to take their learning in the direction they wish too. At Ursula Taylor we operate a topic based curriculum, which encompasses knowledge, skills and opportunities to learn. This topic based approach ensures that English, Maths and Science are taught at a high level, ensuring that our children have many opportunities to demonstrate excellence. It also allows for connections to be made between subjects, concepts and questions to deepen understanding and develop our children's knowledge of culture, history, geography, art, music and belief.
We provide opportunities for staff and children to enrich the learning through offering trips, visits, clubs, visitors and experiences outside of the National Curriculum. We encourage children to offer suggestions about what they would like to learn, bring home learning into school and create projects to showcase the high quality achieved.
Topics at Ursula Taylor are ever changing, they evolve to encompass current affairs, world wide events, festivals, national celebration days and days where we mix up the Key Stages and even the whole school to have a shared learning experience.
The following information regarding specific curriculum elements, details the core aspects covered within the National Curriculum. Over the next two years we are reviewing, developing, altering and improving our curriculum to ensure it remains current, relevant and most importantly, child centred. The documents below will be gradually replaced as we evolve over time.
If you have any questions about the curriculum provision at UTS, please get in touch and we will endeavour to help.