“Our children are at the heart of everything we do”

Curriculum Overview

At Westfield Primary it is our underlying belief that every child should feel valued and experience the feeling of success in a wide range of curriculum areas. We believe that through our curriculum, we can impact how our children feel about themselves and their learning, so that they feel happy, confident and ready to tackle any challenge they may face both inside and outside of school.

At Westfield Primary we place high priority on ensuring we foster children’s physical and mental wellbeing; developing their resilience and self-confidence. We understand that children will not be successful learners unless they are emotionally secure, therefore we carefully design our curriculum and adopt a flexible approach to timetabling to ensure that we can meet and respond to any issues which may arise. We strongly believe that a child’s physical and mental wellbeing should be as valued and important as academic development. This is reflected in our strong values ethos; embedded use of growth mindset; the mindfulness Paws.b curriculum; forest school; daily mile and skip2b fit. We carefully monitor children’s progress with their personal development and our well planned and thoughtful approach to SMSC (spiritual, moral, social and cultural) helps to ensure that every child is well cared for and supported.

Our balanced approach to the curriculum is not at the expense of high standards in core subject areas. High standards and enabling children to reach national expectations and above is of vital importance if they are to succeed at the next stage of their education and go on to achieve full and happy lives and careers. Our full and rich curriculum, with its excellent range of experiences and enquiry led learning, ensures that every pupil at Westfield Primary School makes excellent progress both academically and personally. Our unique curriculum ensures that every child is given the opportunity to shine and flourish. Believing that pupil progress should be the widening and deepening of essential knowledge, skills, understanding and learning behaviours, we have designed, organised and planned our curriculum to ensure that children are not merely covering content but achieving a depth to their learning. It is vital that children understand the learning journey and purpose of learning, using the building blocks to build on how yesterday’s learning will support their understanding today.

Our careful curriculum design and planning means that we build in many opportunities for repetition and practice of essential knowledge, skills and understanding in every subject. This spiral curriculum ensures that children are able to revisit previous learning, which allows them to gradually develop a deeper understanding of the skills and processes within subjects, at their own pace and in the best possible way for each individual child.

The National Curriculum

The National Curriculum is taught as part of the broader school curriculum.

The National Curriculum consists of the Core Subjects, which are English, Mathematics, Science and Computing, and the Foundation Subjects, which are History, Geography, Art, Music, Physical Education (PE), French, Personal, Social, Health and Citizenship Education (PSHCE) and Design Technology (DT). Religious Education (RE) is taught in accordance with the Hertfordshire Agreed Syllabus for RE.

In the Early Years Foundation Stage (Nursery and Reception) children’s learning is planned through both adult directed and child initiated learning, both indoors and out, across the EYFS framework. Years 1-6 pupils are taught all National Curriculum Subjects plus Religious Education. From Year 3 pupils also learn French.

Subject information can be found on the relevant subject page.  For Long Term Plans for each year group please see the individual class pages under Children, Classes.

The National Curriculum website may be of interest to you: The Primary National Curriculum from September 2014

To strengthen our Positive Behaviour policy we have a ‘Values education.’ Every fortnight, we focus on one of our school values within assembly, PSHCE and within all aspects of school life. Our focus value is shared with Parents and Carers each week in our Westfield Weekly bulletin and children who demonstrate these values are celebrated in a weekly assembly and our monthly Westfield News.

The progress of all children is carefully assessed and tracked. Half-termly pupil progress meetings ensure that no child’s progress is ever overlooked