Curriculum Intent & Implementation

"Exceptional success requires exceptional circumstances."

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Mr Lees is our Strategic Curriculum Leader. More information about our Core and Foundation Subject Leaders and our Curriculum Excellence Teams can be found by visiting the Curriculum Leadership page. 

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Our mission: to be a school of excellence.

At Zaytouna Primary School, we provide pupils with a curriculum of excellence that is relevant for the 21st Century, and critically important to their successes now and in their future. Our curriculum develops a child’s mind, body and soul.

We have carefully constructed a curriculum that is ambitious and designed to give all learners, particularly the most disadvantaged, and those children with SEND, the cultural capital they need to succeed in life. Our curriculum considers the fact that our children, in 10 to 15 years, will be entering a workplace where the jobs have not been invented yet or even anticipated.

Our curriculum provides learners with an introduction to the essential knowledge, skills, work habits, and character traits that can be applied across all subject areas, and in all educational, career and social settings throughout their life. It introduces pupils to the best that has been thought and said; and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.

We provide rich opportunities for the children to explore citizenship and real-life world issues, which at times they may have to grapple with to make sense of; this in turn helps them to develop skills such as collaboration and communication, and equips them with the necessary skills for life in the 21st Century.

Equally, the 21st century classroom has no walls – thanks to the internet, teachers with access to computers and tablets can immerse children in a world of fascinating videos, games, facts and creativity. Blended learning is far more than just a combination of print and digital materials. It personalizes the learning environment, allows for spontaneous learning opportunities, deeply engages children with relevant materials and facilitates flexible teaching.

Beginning in the primary classroom, blended learning provides children with the tools they need to become autonomous learners and prepare themselves for a lifelong education and a successful future.

Why do we do what we do? To inspire children to fall in love with learning.

Reading and Phonics at Zaytouna

Reading is at the heart of the curriculum at Zaytouna. Throughout the school, a love for reading is developed and nurtured; high quality texts are used to develop language and writing skills, alongside reading skills. Children are provided with opportunities to develop their reading skills in directed Shared Reading sessions, as well as using opportunities across other curriculum areas.

At Zaytouna, we use Read Write Inc to teach phonics. In Reception, the children start to learn individual letters and the sound that they make. They then follow a structured route as they work towards the expected standard in Year 1 (which is assessed in the Year 1 Phonics Screening Check) and the National Curriculum expectations for word reading through decoding, by the end of Key Stage 1.  In Read Write Inc lessons, children learn to read accurately and fluently with good comprehension. They learn to form each letter, spell correctly and compose their ideas step-by-step.

Throughout the programme, children learn the English alphabetic code: the 150+ graphemes that represent 44 speech sounds. (A grapheme is a letter or letters that make a sound). The children will rapidly learn sounds and the letter, or groups of letters that they need to represent them in Speed Sound lessons. Simple and enjoyable rhymes help the children to grasp the letter-sound correspondences. This learning is taught and consolidated every day. High frequency words that are not phonically regular are taught as Red words and are practised frequently. We also have a soft toy frog called Fred who helps us to learn our sounds with games.

Lively phonic books are closely matched to the children’s increasing knowledge of phonics and Red Words so that, early on, they experience plenty of success. Repeated readings of the texts support their increasingly fluent decoding.  Teachers will read aloud and discuss picture books with similar themes to those in the Storybooks, so the children will build up knowledge ready for the next book.  When reading, the children will read the story three times. On the first read, children will focus on accurate word reading; the second, on developing fluency; and the third, on comprehension. Fluency and comprehension increase with each repeated reading.  The children are assessed continuously in phonics to ensure that they progress and are well supported.  The progression in phonics document is attached below.

As early readers in Key Stage 1, we closely match home reading books to the phonics sounds being taught.  Reading for pleasure is promoted in our Early Years and KS1 and children also enjoy choosing high quality picture books from our library to share at home.  From Key Stage 2, children are encouraged to develop as independent readers, discovering favourite authors amongst the well-stocked shelves in the school library.

Maths at Zaytouna 

We use Power Maths, a UK curriculum mastery programme designed to spark curiosity and excitement and nurture confidence in maths. It is the only mastery programme perfectly aligned to the White Rose Maths progressions and schemes of learning, with an enriched approach that cleverly combines interactive teaching tools, rich and quality textbooks and practice books.

Children in KS1 make effective use of the high quality Power Maths texts books, meaning that more time is spend on maths learning. This gradually moves to children working in their iPads in KS2, promoting a shift towards independence. 

How do we achieve excellence?

Our Curriculum is implemented with our Curriculum Intent at the heart of all we do at Zaytouna Primary.

Our curriculum is designed using a cross-curricular approach, as we know this enables our children to make connections across their learning, leading to deeper learning experiences. Through this approach, the learning is slowed down, covering less but in much greater depth. This allows pupils to gain the declarative knowledge to support the building of effective schemas and master the procedural knowledge through each sequence of learning. Our curriculum Enterprises are framed around key Global Themes:

• Rights and responsibilities

• Peace and conflict

• Identity and diversity

• Sustainable development

• Health and wellbeing

Each curriculum subject discipline forms part of a Curriculum Excellence Team. These are as follows:

• Language, Arts and Culture – Reading, writing, art and design, music, Arabic
• People, Places and Politics – History, geography, religious education, QIS
• STEM – Science, design technology, mathematics, computing
• Health and Well-being – PE, RHE, Enrichment, PSHE

Our comprehensive whole school curriculum document maps out, for each subject discipline, the declarative and procedural knowledge that our children need to know and remember for each year of their primary career.

This whole school document is implemented through long term curriculum Enterprise maps, medium term plans and short term plans.

In summary, our implementation looks like this:

What are each Year group learning this term?

Take a look at our comprehensive Medium Terms Plans to gain a detailed understanding of what your child will be learning in each subject discipline within the curriculum.