The Ludham Primary School and Nursery Curriculum

“Achieving excellence through Enjoyment”

There could be someone in our school who leads us when the world’s resources have run out, someone who resolves the crisis in the Middle East, or someone who prepares us for the next pandemic. At Ludham Primary School and Nursery, we try our best to find them and help them to become it because they won’t know it yet. Our curriculum is about “beginning with the end in mind”.

Ludham is in the most deprived (1st decile) with regards to ‘geographical barriers’, relating to physical proximity to local services and we see it as our mission to ensure that our children don’t miss out on opportunities to “learn through enjoyment”. As a school we work hard on our curriculum to break down these barriers, to give children opportunities and experiences that they may not otherwise have had, for example, going to a beach, a bee farm, the circus. Opportunities that many children in other areas may take for granted.  We invest considerable time and energy in bringing diverse workshops, visitors, writers, artists, sports-people and visitors from all walks of life into school. We are careful to plan opportunities for each child to participate in trips and visits which engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement, as well as scrutinising our curriculum in a rolling cycle to ensure we are equipping pupils with the essential knowledge and cultural capital they need to be educated citizens, while working hard to introduce them to the best that has been thought and said.  

In our Early Years this means we focus on making sure our children are confident talkers and on developing the foundations of Early Reading through systematic teaching of phonics and sharing our love of stories and books. We have worked with the EEF, Education Consultants, Challenge Partners, Cluster groups, Local and National Networks as well as the DfE to ensure that we remain as current with educational research as possible.

We follow the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum. We are building our school environment to best enable the early years children to develop physically, emotionally, mentally and socially through wonderful, exploratory, sensory experiences in our mud kitchen, giant sandpit and woodland area. The children are supported to learn to work together, manage their feelings and ask questions through skilled adult facilitated play. The children learn nursery rhymes and develop their mathematical thinking through direct teaching and exploration.

We believe that our pupils deserve a curriculum that gives them improved life chances by enabling social equity and mobility. We start with a focus on the foundations of English and Maths throughout school, ensuring children experience a broad rich vocabulary; share wonderful stories and books; and are given opportunities to develop a deep understanding of maths concepts through systematic teaching and practical exploration. We have developed our foundation curriculum and we have taken some of the building blocks of tried, tested and successful schemes/programmes from across the country and then tailored them to suit our pupils’ needs.

We use technology creatively to build fluency through practice, increase engagement, and allow us to look back at previous learning so we can see how it builds over time. Our online learning journals also give our families a window into our learning. We have ensured we have closed the digital divide by delivering devices to families to ensure all of our children have access to online learning. Further up the school we want to build in experiences our children might otherwise not have the chance to experience. Sometimes physically and when constraints make it more difficult (COVID) we visit virtually.

We are proud to be from the East of England and want to learn about the rich heritage of our ward and district. We learn how it has been part of the history of our country and its influences. We have partnered with Historic England and the local Archive group to ensure experts are guiding the history and geography behind our curriculum, gaining access to resources that would not otherwise be available. We have also engaged our community with many sharing their experiences of living in the area over time.

We learn where our local history influences the wider world through a focus on those areas in our foundation curriculums. We seek to lift up our children’s eyes to widen out their view of their world. Through the academic years, our children learn about local history and geography but then also a wider context across the world. We teach our children to respect different cultures. They grow to understand what we have in common, to know about different faiths and to be accepting and tolerant of others. Our languages curriculum allows us to explore and learn a common language and culture. 

Statistics show us that the reality is that children and teenagers in our area are vulnerable for many reasons. With thisin mind, it is crucial that our curriculum teaches children how to stay safe and give them the tools to make choices which change their community. This starts in Early Years with an understanding of private parts and appropriate touch using the NSPCC Pantosaurus material building over time to a sophisticated understanding of the dangers of grooming for our older children.

Our curriculum builds on big ideas and concepts so that children have the knowledge and skills to look wider than their immediate context and make different, aspirational choices. We look beyond the primary school experience to ensure that our children have a foundation, so they are secondary ready. We are conscious that the next external qualification our children will gain will be at KS4 and develop our curriculum with that in mind. We therefore put in place the intellectual architecture that is needed for children to develop a conceptual structure:

Examples include the teaching of Christianity, Tudors, Greeks and Romans so that our children will be able to understand the themes behind Shakespeare so they can understand the contexts and references of the plays for GCSE English.

A new National Curriculum for Primary Schools came into law from September 2014. You can find the full document at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum

Children in the Early Years (Reception) follow the requirements of ‘Early Years Foundation Stage Framework’. You can find the full document at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/early-years-foundation-stage-framework–2

Wherever possible we also seek to make meaningful links for the children between subjects and also to reinforce key English and maths skills across the curriculum. This includes extended writing opportunities planned in across the curriculum, and also planned opportunities for real-life Maths experiences, to supplement the daily discrete Maths lessons.

We seek also to actively promote British Values of tolerance, understanding of different faiths, democracy and the rule of law through our taught curriculum and school ethos.

Planning is broken down into half term blocks. We have mixed age classes and there is a two-year cycle of planning for each class.

The school takes part in all the road safety learning opportunities provided through the Norfolk Road Safety team, from the Early Years, right through to Year 6. Work is also done on e-safety and anti-bullying. How to keep safe and healthy is further reinforced through our assembly themes, and Behaviour Policy.

We have carefully thought through our curriculum and we are taking actions to embed it. The impact of all of this is that children leave Ludham having achieved excellent academic standards, but also prepared as fluent, resilient, ambitious, lifelong learners ready to thrive in the next stage of their education.