Our Curriculum
CURRICULUM INTENT STATEMENT
The curriculum at Wild Bank intends for each pupil to experience a wide breadth of study and have long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge. We strive to provide our children with the opportunities to become life longer learners, with the skills they need to grow and thrive.
Curriculum drivers shape our curriculum. They are derived from an exploration of the backgrounds of our students, our beliefs about high quality education and our values (SPARKLE). They are used to ensure we give our students appropriate and ambitious curriculum opportunities. Our four key drivers for our school curriculum are:
RETENTION OF LONG-TERM KNOWLEDGE
Learning is a change to long term memory. Cognitive science tells us that working memory is limited and that cognitive load is too high if students are rushed through content. This limits the acquisition of long term memory. Cognitive science also tells us that in order for students to become creative thinkers, or have a greater depth of understanding they must first master the basics, which takes time. The timescale for sustained mastery or greater depth in Wild Bank is two years of study for Art, History and Geography and regular revisits for other foundation subjects, ensuring that we always use the two-year cycle of basic, advancing and deep. Our curriculum distinguishes between subject topics and key concepts. Subject topics are the specific aspects of subjects that are studied. Key concepts tie together the subjects into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, students return to the same concepts over and over and gradually build an understanding of them.
