Our curriculum

At Lady Margaret Primary School, we strive to provide pupils with a curriculum that is rich in a variety of knowledge and experience in school, no matter what their skills and abilities, and regardless of their personal circumstances.

We have developed our curriculum around four key themes which we believe both connect the learning for the pupils and aid their development of the understanding of important ideas and issues.

LMPS – Meaningful Learning opportunities and strong Motivation leads to rapid Progress and high levels of Success.

• Inspiring LEGACY – our pupils will leave with wonder and passion for ideas, creativity, science and nature having personally connected with culture, ideas, inventions and special places through the curriculum
• Active MORALITY – our pupils will leave with compassion and understanding and a desire to do the right thing has made a difference by helping others in the community throughout their time at LMPS
• Responsible POWER- our pupils will leave with the power to manage their thinking and well being and work well with others. They will gain the powers of analysis and problem solving each subject offers having solved a number of important and challenging problems and made change happen, working with others
• A commitment to SUSTAINABILITY – pupils will leave with a sense of common humanity and connection to nature has been ‘good stewards’ for the planet and connected with others in different parts of the world

We use high-quality texts and have half termly ‘hook’ events linked to topics, to engage learners, impart knowledge and enhance skills. Each year group will have at least six different opportunities to take part in a variety of trips and experiences.

We have worked rigorously to design a curriculum suitable for all of our children while maintaining high standards in English and mathematics. This is evident through our half termly curriculum coverage maps.

Our curriculum contributes to the social, moral, spiritual and cultural development of pupils through all aspects of school life and particularly through the teaching of beliefs and values, RSE, rights-respecting and our ambassador system, as we strive to prepare our children for life in Britain today.

If you have any questions in relation to the curriculum please speak to your child’s class teacher.

The staff at LMPS invested time to completely revise the school curriculum in light of the revised national curriculum changes effective from 2014.

We reviewed what we considered to be key elements of a high quality curriculum and built these aspects into our teaching such as outdoor learning, use of experts and school trips to enhance topics, celebration of our cultural diversity and the development of tolerant and respectful citizens.

Our topics are stimulated by high quality texts and we have worked closely with the CLPE to select texts carefully to engage the pupils fully in their learning. All topics are enhanced by home learning sheets to guide parents on activities they may do with their child to support their learning. We begin each topic with a session to seek the views of pupils about their knowledge in order to ascertain what they already know and what they would like to learn.

Planning is then modified to respond to this feedback to ensure it is appropriately pitched. We punctuate our timetable with the use of immersion days for particular curriculum areas or projects we are involved in which provides excellent opportunities for children to explore subjects and deeper their learning. Classrooms reflect the topic focus with high quality displays and questions to promote further thinking.

We focus on topic ‘launch days’ to ensure all topics start with an engaging event to excite and inspire pupils.  The curriculum has a mixture of integrated work and discrete elements; if subjects can be taught meaningfully through the cross-curricular topic approach we aim to do this. However, when subjects need to be taught discretely teachers plan lessons accordingly.