Overarching Curriculum Approach

We believe that at Tymberwood Academy, the curriculum begins as soon as you enter the school grounds.  We fully understand that our role as educators is to prepare our pupils, in every possible way that we can, for the next stages of their learning to become respectable citizens heading into modern Britain.

With this in mind, our curriculum is designed with three clear ‘circles of influence and intent’ which reflect a significant amount of the work we do with Tymberwood pupils:

• Skills and Knowledge

àEnsuring our children ‘know more, remember more and apply’ with a progressively sequenced and ambitious curriculum.

• Enrichment and Opportunities

àEnsuring that all children are exposed to the ‘big’ and the ‘little’ experiences in life to build on their cultural capital and creating opportunities to open doors.

• Behaviours for Life

à Ensuring that we teach our children to uphold the values and virtues that stand the test of time.

One circle alone, or even two, would not fully prepare the ambitious, determined, aspirational and compassionate pupils we want to go forth into society.

Please see below for a full breakdown of each circle:  

Skills and Knowledge

• The overriding aim is for pupils to know more, remember more and apply that knowledge in contrasting ways.
• Teaching a broad and balanced curriculum, based on the National Curriculum and building from as soon as the children start school in Nursery or Reception, where all children have the opportunity to discover interests and unknown strengths across the wide breadth of areas.
• Content is mapped across the school from the Early Years to ensure that there is a progression of skills and knowledge in each year group and between them too. This knowledge is continually ‘reactivated’ and ‘retrieved’.
• We intend to give those with SEND as many of the same skills and knowledge chances, if not all, as those without SEND whilst also ensuring that the specifics of their  EHCPs are met to give them the best life chances.
• We promote breadth and depth of the curriculum rather than acceleration through the use of application, reasoning and the higher order thinking skills of ‘Blooms Taxonomy’.
• Ultimately we equip pupils, particularly within core subjects, with the appropriate skills and knowledge necessary to be successful in the next stage of learning and in later life, including opening the door to being able to read confidently and fluently across a wide range of genres.
• We enable this to happen by having a clear Teaching and Learning Philosophy (The Tymberwood ‘Teaching and Learning’ Building Blocks – see attached) which ensures that we deliver a consistency of approach and pupil’s retrieval of knowledge and skills is built within the long-term memory.

Enrichment and Opportunity

• Serving a diverse and unique community, it is vital that all pupils have the cultural capital and local, contextual information that will support and inspire them to access learning at an age-appropriate level.
• A clear focus on ‘Making Learning Real’ is genuine at Tymberwood.  
• The ‘small’ everyday experiences, such as riding a bike or learning how to use weighing scales for a purpose, are mapped and woven through the curriculum offer to ensure that doors are opened for all of our children, no matter their contextual background, to give the cultural capital to base their learning on.
• Across the school, pupils are given at least three ‘big’ enrichment opportunities (trips / internal visits) per year alongside a whole school 11b411 programme (11 amazing opportunities before the age of 11) which ensures pupils’ time at school is deeply memorable and gives learning a hook in to the long term memory. It also forges clear links within the wider community.

Behaviours for Life

• With over 65% of jobs likely to change in the next 10 / 15 years due to the technological revolution, we cannot fully prepare our pupils for the job market and society with the curriculum content we deliver.  However, we know that we can support our children by teaching them to hold the right values and virtues which they can apply in aspects of life.
• We encourage our pupils to have the tolerance to listen to somebody with whom they profoundly disagree, to have resilience and persistence when failure occurs, and have ambition and the drive for instance, to be the first family member to secure a high quality apprenticeship, or to head to University or to think bigger than just the job that they want to do – eg owning a chain of builder yards, rather than just one.  Also to display empathy and have the ability to develop collaborative skills to tackle complex problems, whilst also having the ability to work independently when they need to.  Underpinning all of this is ensuring that our children understand the diverse world that we live in and embrace the differences that we all have, including securely establishing their own self-identity and confidence. At Tymberwood, we see these as important life skills to work alongside the deep, rich curriculum that can catapult pupils to great success.   
• We have therefore defined this circle of influence and intent as:

Behaviours for Life = School Values + Learning Behaviours + Aspiration

• Using discreet teaching of ‘behaviours for life’, assemblies and tailored PSHE lessons, we ensure that all pupils understand what in life can be achieved through determination and good practise.  

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Ultimately, by providing all of these aspects within the ‘three circles of influence and intent’, we are stamping all pages of each child’s passport to say that they have the skills, knowledge, experiences and tools to move on to the next stage of their learning and life.