Curriculum

At Burneston School our curriculum is based on research and current pedagogy.  It is flexible and responsive to the needs of our pupils and the community which we serve.    Care and thought has been given to the order in which we teach, and the skills which children will acquire as they progress through our school.  We recognise that what we teach and how we teach should be interlinked in order to give our children the best outcomes and so we review and revisit both processes regularly.

First and foremost, it must give children the knowledge and skills they need to become responsible, active citizens, who are confident, articulate and empowered to contribute to their communities and the wider world.

At its most basic, the curriculum must teach pupils the key skills of reading, writing and maths so that they are ready for the next stage of their education.  Of these three, reading is prioritised in our curriculum, as without reading, pupils are at a disadvantage when accessing other subject areas.  Learners in our school are taught the basic reading skills quickly, and our love of reading permeates our curriculum and school. 

These core skills underpin a vibrant and engaging curriculum which is broad in its reach and demanding in its rigour. National Curriculum Programmes of Study form a solid foundation for children to gain skills and knowledge, and our development of pupil learning behaviours, such as Growth Mindset and metacognition, through our Learning to Learn curriculum give children the opportunity, the skills and indeed the responsibility to take ownership of their own learning.  Our spiral approach to long term planning, our emphasis on teacher pedagogy, and our determination for our children to succeed to the best of their abilities all work together to embed this shared ethos throughout everything we do.

Our curriculum aims to facilitate inclusivity and parity of experience for our children.  All our children will have access to all subjects.  Teachers and leaders work reflectively, giving thought to how all learners can access the curriculum, and how they will engage with it leading to the best outcomes for each and every learner in our school.  Vulnerable groups are carefully scaffolded and supported to engage fully with their learning, and all learners are given the opportunity and the challenge to push themselves to achieve across all subjects. 

We have taken the views of stakeholders in order to key into both the barriers to learning particular to the children in our setting, and the strengths provided by our location, staff and position as a Church of England school. As a result of this, we have taken time to build upon the National Curriculum and personalise it to our needs, widening its span to incorporate, for example, additional focus on countering monoculturalism, or enhancing Key Stage 2 opportunities through our joint project with the Yorkshire Dales National Parks. Spiral curriculum planning over a two year cycle enables us to weave in these personal development opportunities in a holistic, proactive manner. 

Cultural capital is vital for our learners and is taught and planned for deliberately and explicitly.  Our community is disparate in terms of socio-economics, life experiences and aspirations.  We aim to use our school’s curriculum to engender parity for our children.  Our curriculum planning enables us to ensure our pupils have access to a wide range of activities and visits for first hand experiences.  The more you know, the more you can know – we recognise this, and encourage learners to make connections with their learning.  A key part of our curriculum is around learning behaviours, which are explicitly taught from early on, and underpin our Celebrate, Collaborate, Pollinate approach.  As well as this, we bring in opportunities to widen learners’ cultural capital opportunities through the texts we choose to teach from or read to and with our children, and through the curriculum drivers we choose.  Again, these are reinforced through celebration, collaboration and pollination.

Matthew Oakeshott’s metaphor of ‘the Conversation of Mankind’ resonates and gives our curriculum purpose: “As civilised human beings, we are the inheritors… of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries.  It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.” – ie, beyond teaching the best of what has been thought and said, we are trying, through our curriculum, to give learners the knowledge, confidence and articulacy to engage in the conversation of mankind.  We maximise the delivery of knowledge and skills for our learners, so that they can have their say about what that ‘best’ might be.

References:

Matthew Oakeshott

Tom Sherrington

Benjamin Bloom

Barak Rosenshine

Rainbow Continuum

Learning to Learn

National Curriculum

Our Vision at Burneston School centres around the theme of bees. Bees work hard. They
work effectively together. In our school, we celebrate our hardworking children,
collaborating together to create a buzz about learning, and pollinating as they take their
learning and our values further afield into the wider world. We feel strongly that our
children are like bees – they are seemingly small and insignificant, but actually without
them, our planet would have no future. The metaphor of bees enables us to value the
small but also to recognise its importance in the bigger picture. As part of this theme, we
have developed three key concepts:
Celebrate, Collaborate and Pollinate
These concepts encapsulate our approach to teaching and learning. They represent the
learning experiences teachers and leaders plan for the children in our care. They work in
synthesis, deepening and securing the children’s knowledge and understanding, giving
them opportunities to drive their own learning, learn for purpose, and share their
understanding. Over each pupil’s time with us in school, these three areas will work
together to develop the whole child, nurturing their character and supporting their
personal, social and moral growth. The three strands thread through many processes in
school for example: curriculum planning, subject leadership, monitoring will all evidence
these areas. Every adult and child in school will be able to elucidate these concepts in an
appropriate way.
Celebrate: high standards, positive learning behaviour and tangible engagement
This concept is embodied by high expectations and aspirations for every learner in our
school. It can be on a pupil, class or whole school level, but primarily seeks to influence
individual responsibility for learning behaviours. Metacognition and Learning Culture has
been identified as a potential barrier to learning, and the Celebrate strand addresses this
through direct teaching about metacognition, repeated planned opportunities to embed
successful learning behaviours and the development of extrinsic and intrinsic rewards
and motivations for success. It goes beyond certificates and celebration assemblies
(though these still have roles to play), and looks at clarifying and normalising positive,
accountable learning behaviours within our school culture. As a result of this, children
will be able to talk about their learning, link wider concepts and wring every drop of
learning out of their time in school.
Collaborate: teamwork, effective participation and building positive relationships
In addition to intrinsic learning motivation and the metacognitive skillset rewarded
through Celebrate, we would like the children to be able to work effectively with others.
Again, this is developed through planned, sequenced teaching and learning opportunities
using the National Curriculum programmes of study and is adapted to address the
identified potential barriers to learning in our setting. As part of this children will learn
how to work effectively with other people. They will learn to become team workers and
resourceful thinkers, supported and challenged by a vibrant and engaging curriculum.
This forms part of teaching and learning around character development, and also
supports the teaching of effective learning behaviours. Through Collaborate, our

children will be able to confidently articulate their learning, support others and continue
to take ownership of and responsibility for their own learning.
Pollinate: understanding, exploring and contributing to the wider world
This element links closely with the other two, but adds the nuance of taking a bit of
Burneston, and what it means to be a Burneston learner, out into the world. We want
our children to feel that they have agency, that they can make a difference, and that the
skills they learn in our school will help them to do this. This could be through initiatives
such as the Duke of Burneston, becoming a School of Sanctuary or even being inspired
by the books we read to make a global difference, eg Trash by Andy Mulligan leading to
fundraising for children in Manila. Pollinate fits closely with our vision, and our Christian
values, and the idea that although we are small children, from a small village, we have
rights and responsibilities too, and we can orchestrate or be part of large–scale change.
Our curriculum is geared towards giving children the skills, knowledge and cultural
capital to be able to do this. We want to light fires, not fill buckets – our children are
have the potential to be anything they want to be, and Pollinate throws the challenge to
them.
References:
Paul Dix
Tom Sherrington
Dylan Wiliam
Rob Carpenter
Will Ryan
Andy Buck
Carol Dweck
Barack Rosenshine
Benjamin Bloom

At Burneston School we agree with Plutarch:  ‘the mind is not a vessel to be filled but wood to be ignited’.  We aim to be fire lighters, not bucket fillers!  Consultation with stakeholders has found Learning Behaviours to be something which needs to be explicitly taught in our school so that pupils can optimise their learning, and take ownership of and responsibility for it.

We have radically redesigned our curriculum, reading widely and updating our pedagogical approaches in order to facilitate this.  Our approach draws on many sources: Rosenshine, Dweck, Sherrington, Dix for example.  Our aim is to teach our children a range of thinking skills and learning behaviours which they can apply to any subject or situation, and which will instil in them a life-long love of learning.

We have aligned our approach to learning behaviours within our wider ethos of Celebrate, Collaborate and Pollinate:

Teaching, either through Nodal Points or as discrete subjects, will be carefully planned and sequenced to enable learners to develop and embody these skills.