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Our Curriculum 

At Gonerby Hill Foot Church, we aim to offer an ambitious educational experience, developing a lifelong love of learning for all. 

We also want to foster a spirit of self-worth, compassion and respect across our community. Together, we aim to empower our pupils to be resilient, responsible global citizens.

With this in mind, we have an aspirational curriculum that is both challenging and progressive, enabling pupils’ learning to be ‘outward-facing’, leading to them becoming well-rounded and happy individuals. Developing the theme of service, we want our pupils to not only care about themselves, but about others and the environment.

We aim to offer inclusive, cohesive learning, that highlights the importance of human creativity and achievement and leads to the development of educated citizens within our own community and on a wider global scale.

Providing opportunities for learning which enable our children to grow is a priority, encouraging them to access and engage with the curriculum to ensure both academic and personal success.

We use Dimensions ‘Learning Means the World’ Curriculum as the main vehicle for achieving our outlined intent, with a view to providing an ambitious, highly visible curriculum offer.

This curriculum is underpinned by four highly relevant world issues, known as the four C's.

Communication

Our children need to be empowered to become articulate and improving vocabulary this is an area for development. We want them to be able to communicate honestly, but within a community of kindness where everyone is treated in a respectful way. Our pupils need to understand their feelings and become emotionally literate and able to express their emotions effectively and constructively. We want them to communicate well so they can share their skills and expertise, offering support to their peers, which requires good, kind communication. They need to understand how the receiver of communication feels, so they can communicate in a compassionate way.

Having the courage to communicate in a group setting is also important.

Communication through the bombardment of the media means they need the skills to be able to navigate the world safely and confidently, drawing their own conclusions and understanding the importance and influence of online communication.

Culture

As a school that predominantly represents a White British demographic, with little exposure to, or awareness of, other groups, we support our pupils to develop tolerance, respect and understanding of other cultures. We want them to fully appreciate and embrace diversity by celebrating and developing an understanding of a range of different cultural and faith heritages. We want them to value difference, understand the roots and importance of cultural heritage and behave in a respectful and tolerant way towards others, regardless of faith, ethnicity or background.

We also want to grow our own unique culture in school, based on our Christian faith, values and commitment to learning, loving, living.

Conflict

Our pupils need to be able to see other perspectives and viewpoints, in order to be able to identify the roots of conflict. As our pupils develop self-awareness and emotional literacy, they are able to empathise with others. Pupils learn to be sympathetic first, which will, in turn, lead to empathy. We promote a culture where pupils look to serve others rather than solely meeting their own needs.

We want them to practise love and forgiveness, putting perceived differences to one side and resolving issues well.

We seek to develop positive relationships across the whole school community through our restorative approach.

Having a developed understanding of sources of conflict and recognising the impact that conflict can have on relationships at a personal, local, national and international scale, we believe, will make a difference to their own choices. We want our pupils to be able to independently manage conflict, whenever it may arise, in a constructive, timely manner. Through this curriculum we believe we can provide our pupils with strategies to deal with conflict issues in a positive way.

Conservation

We want our pupils to care passionately about our world and to engage actively with conservation issues as good stewards of God’s world, both now and in the future. We feel they will do this best through a curriculum that puts sustainability at the heart of the curriculum, employing a more structured approach to developing environmental awareness and appreciation, not just at local, but also national and global levels.

In order to do this, they need an understanding of, and love for, the wider world. We need to help combat the throw away culture, helping pupils realise the consequences of their actions. We also want them to become much more pro-active by serving the local community in the small things first, before thinking on a larger scale.

We also encourage our pupils to have high aspirations by teaching them about human creativity and achievement through additional Competency Units about famous figures that focus on Creativity, Commitment, Courage and Community.

Implementation

We are very proud of the exciting curriculum we provide at GHF.  As many areas of the curriculum are naturally interrelated, we find the most effective approach is through topic work and we have an exciting range of topics and themes which our pupils love. As we have mixed year classes, we work on a two year cycle so that there is no chance pupils will repeat a topic.  Our topics are enriched with fantastic visits and visitors and everyone loves the opportunity to get dressed up and fully emerged into a theme. As it is not always possible to make meaningful links across the breadth of the curriculum, there are parts that are taught discretely. However, it is our full aim to ensure that pupils apply the skills they have learned in purposeful ways, throughout.

Progression

Starting with pupils in our EYFS classes, we follow the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum which covers seventeen Early Learning Goals in seven key areas of learning. Our pupils learn through planned and purposeful play and through a mix of activities that are led by adults or initiated by the child themselves. 

From Year 1 onwards, we follow the current National Curriculum in accordance with legal requirements. This is a nationally set programme in which pupils are formally assessed in the core subjects at the ages of 7 and 11.

Subjects

The core National Curriculum subjects are:

Alongside these core subjects, we teach the foundation subjects:

Our curriculum also encompasses Religious Education and Personal, Social and Health Education focusing on the development of the children's moral and spiritual understanding.

Educational Experiences and Visits

All our pupils have the opportunity to take part in school visits.  These may range from a visit within easy walking distance, a day visit further afield or an extended residential stay. Such visits provide first-hand experiences and great pleasure which in turn motivates and stimulates the educational learning process in many areas of the curriculum.  The school does rely on parents’ contributions towards transport and entrance fees in order to offer these curriculum enriching visits and their generosity has meant that very few trips have been cancelled.

Residential visits take place in KS2.  

  1. curriculum policy July 2022
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