The Curriculum at WHA

We are proud and excited about the curriculum at WHA because, after all, that is what we get up in the morning to deliver! Every subject in the curriculum offered at WHA stands on four broad aspects; Knowledge, experience, breadth and values. (Please see our Curriculum Intent document) These underpin every decision teachers make in order to teach effectively. The knowledge taught is based upon the Early Learning Goals and the National Curriculum, the children have meaningful experiences in their learning, the breadth of the curriculum is designed so no subject is left out and every subject has an integrity – and the knowledge experiences and skills lower down the school feed into the subjects and units in the upper school, ensuring progress and a wealth of knowledge for the children to draw upon as they meet new challenges and learning. We promote our values in every aspect of the curriculum and encourage collaborative work as well as individual scholarship.

We do believe in a cross curricular approach, in order to enable children to make sense of their learning, but understand that if we were to tie in every subject to our Project Based Learning, the integrity of each subject may be lost and the learning watered down. For this reason we also offer specialist teaching in Music, Computing, MFL and PE – each carefully constructed to ensure progress and excellent outcomes. The Specialist teachers have crafted their scheme based upon their assessment of the children, and this has led to the need to change it annually as – for example in computing- by the end of a year, the teacher knows that the year 3’s going to year 4 are in a stronger place than the previous year 4. The core subjects are taught by class teachers, and where possible tie into the project based learning for the term including carefully chosen class texts to teach reading and appropriate genres selected to develop writing in English. If a natural link cannot be made with a subject for that term, that subject is either omitted to give way for the PBL focus (ie History, not Geography) or taught discretely such as Maths or Science.

Seeing that we have a multicultural cohort, it has been decided to adopt and follow a tried and tested RE scheme (Discovery RE) and an RSE scheme (formally PSHE) called Jigsaw –the latter of which has been adopted by the Park Federation.  This is to ensure our parents can be confident that the material delivered has no bias and delivers the national requirements. These schemes have been adopted because they also fit with the principles of our curriculum and have a range of experiences – not just knowledge.

Please take time to find out more about how our fantastic curriculum is organised.