Curriculum at Mendell Primary School

Our approach to our curriculum at Mendell is based upon: Consistency Insistency Ambition

Cognitive science research tells us lots of things that can help us support our learners. For example:

learning is tricky and takes time;
forgetting is part of learning;
learning new things is easier if we already know a little bit;
we need to actively remember things to store them in our long term memory;
quizzes are really helpful.

We made use of these findings when we designed our curriculum to support our children to know more and remember more over time. Our curriculum delivery model has been planned to allow us to delve in to knowledge, then revisit it. We alternate some of our subjects so they are taught once a week for half a term, then revisited the following term. Some of our subjects are ‘block’ taught so rather than revisiting the lesson every week, they are taught daily over the course of a week or more then revisited the following term.

At Mendell we have ensured our curriculum is highly personalised and is planned specifically for our school. During the academic year 2021-22 we wrote our own curriculum for: history, geography, science, computing, DT and MFL. In our other subjects, we are using carefully selected high quality schemes. In Art we have written our own curriculum which is supplemented with a scheme as well.

When designing our curriculums we have ensured the following:

Carefully sequenced, progressive steps of learning
Reading is prioritised
Checks for understanding built in so that children and teachers can assess progress during lessons
Key concepts are revisited in other subjects to allow over learning
Our curriculum embraces equality and diversity
‘Keeping Skills’ sessions where we revisit ‘Memory Flash Points’ to commit learning to long term memory

We follow the National Curriculum requirements for all subjects