Vision

At County Bridge Primary School, we aim to provide children with a safe, nurturing and stimulating start to their learning journey. Children are provided with a progressive, well-sequenced curriculum that will excite, engage and introduce new concepts to embed skills and knowledge to long term memory, enabling our children to achieve the highest possible outcomes. We encourage the growth of each child’s independence, resilience and lifelong ‘love for learning’ throughout all stages of their development. We endeavour to provide a language-rich environment for our children, with books, stories and interactions at the heart of everything that we do. We have a priority focus on early reading, writing and maths, with a huge emphasis on developing an ambitiously rich vocabulary to make our children confident and successful speakers and learners.

Intent

We provide a high quality Early Years Foundation Stage giving our children a secure and confident start to their school life. We endeavour to ensure that all of our children are immersed in a purposefully planned, continuous provision that provides the essential knowledge that children need to prepare them for their future success. Our unique, ambitious, child-centred curriculum meets the needs of all our children and we strongly believe that every child can achieve – there are no limits or barriers to an individual’s success.

Many of our children begin their school journey well below national expectations for their age. We teach them how to actively listen, speak and meet the high expectations for behaviour by working together and embedding our County Bridge values and the core British values. As such, we prioritise personal, social and emotional development and communication and language. We invest time and energy into helping children set and reflect on their own goals by aiming high and developing a love for reading, writing and number.

Our staff have a good understanding of child development and know how to support children to move their learning forward. We assess, observe, scaffold and capture ‘in the moment’ learning to ensure our children make more than just good progress.

Our aim is to establish confident learners who are curious about the world around them. We offer a holistic approach towards helping children learn, ensuring that the characteristics of effective learning are entwined in everything that we do. The importance of securing positive relationships, attitudes and behaviours is integral to our teaching.

Our enabling environment and warm, skilful adult interactions support our children as they begin to link learning to their play and exploration. We provide opportunities for meaningful cross-curricular links and learning experiences as well as promoting all the aspects of the unique child. We offer extended periods of play and sustained thinking following the children’s interests and ideas. We value imagination and creativity and seek to create a sense of enjoyment and fascination in learning through our continuous indoor and outdoor provision.

Implementation

Our children learn through a balance of child-initiated and adult led learning. The curriculum is taught in a logical, systematic way so that children have the necessary foundations and cultural capital to prepare them for the rest of their lives.

Our sequential curriculum ensures children have the opportunity to consolidate their learning before moving onto the next stage in their development.

We have created a curriculum based around our knowledge of the historical trends in data, the local context of the school, our commitment to widen our children’s knowledge, skills and experiences and our whole school priorities. These key determiners shape our unique curriculum. Our children will accomplish this curriculum in readiness for the next stage of their education.

We set ambitious, yet realistic targets for each child to meet throughout the year and closely monitor their progress. Our assessment informs our objective-led, next step planning which supports children in developing, consolidating and deepening their knowledge and skills across all areas of learning.

During child-initiated and adult-led learning, we promote appropriate discussion about the subject being taught and use questioning effectively to check individuals’ understanding and identify and address misconceptions. Our staff understand their role of being a ‘play partner’, modelling language, developing enquiring minds and interacting through genuine interest and enthusiasm.

Our inclusive approach means that all our children learn together/. However, we do provide a range of additional intervention and support to enhance and scaffold the learning for children who may not be reaching their potential. This includes, Early Talk Boost, daily 1 to 1 reading, Wellcomm intervention, phonics booster and 1 to 1 personalised speech and language programmes.

Reading is at the heart of our curriculum and we encourage a love of reading right from the start. The environment is rich with books, story stacks, props, puppets and nursery rhymes. We expose children to books and print in every area of learning from a range of different materials such as information books, leaflets, magazines etc.

Each week we welcome parents into our classrooms to share a story with their child to encourage their ‘love for reading’. Both Nursery and Reception have an allocated author and explore stories that have been written by them. These books have been specifically chosen to develop children’s oracy, vocabulary and comprehension. Our planned ‘Talk for Writing’ sessions allow children to learn key skills such as storytelling, sequencing and word reading. Nursery follow our pre-phonics learning and Reception follow the highly successful Read, Write Inc programme through daily phonics teaching. This enables children to be competent in their phonics knowledge and be able to form all letters of the alphabet correctly in order to write a simple sentence by the time they reach Year 1.

Through daily maths teaching, children are taught the key skills of number, calculation and shape so that they develop a deep understanding of maths. Children learn through games and tasks using concrete manipulatives which are then rehearsed and applied to their own learning during exploration. These early mathematical experiences are carefully designed to help children remember the content they have been taught and to support them with integrating their new knowledge across the breadth of their experiences, prior learning and into larger concepts.

We provide children with a range and breadth of first-hand experiences to enhance their learning. We go on visits to support this and have a particular focus on our local area. We invite parents in for ‘Inspire’ mornings and workshops relating to children’s learning that will provide the spark for further discussion and immersion in the topics studied.

Promoting a healthy lifestyle is important for our children so that they can make the correct choices in accordance to their health, hygiene, diet and exercise. We support children’s wellbeing and mental health through our PSHE scheme of work, Jigsaw.

Many of our children enter nursery with little knowledge of the world. We provide children with rich experiences to develop a greater understanding of the important processes and changes in the natural world around them.

Impact

Our Early Years curriculum meets the needs of all of our children, including our disadvantaged and those with special educational needs. Children in nursery, on average, arrive with significantly lower starting points than national. During their time in our Early Years setting, children make rapid progress so that they meet, and often exceed, the national expectation for ‘Good Level of Development’ at the end of the foundation years.

Our children leave our early years being able to manage their own feelings and behaviour and they understand how their behaviour can have an impact on others. We believe our high standards and successful outcomes are due to the purposeful objective-led learning. This is further enhanced by the enriched play-based exploration alongside the rigour of assessment and high quality teaching in our early years setting.