At Carden Nursery and Primary School we believe in providing high quality, active, purposeful and experiential learning opportunities. Our aim is to engage and equip pupils with the skills, knowledge and understanding they require to be successful learners.

Our Core Values and Learning Journey Skills underpin our language rich curriculum which is mapped to include coverage of the national curriculum as well as numerous enrichment activities and outdoor learning opportunities. Our curriculum challenges all pupils; engages their imagination; encourages their curiosity and motivates them to take the next steps in their learning.

We believe that the curriculum is everything that happens throughout the day, both in and out of school; we value and celebrate experiences and achievements from home.

Our ultimate goal is for all learners to be successful, confident, happy individuals, who make positive contributions within their community, respect diversity and value equality of opportunity both now and in the future.

At Carden, our curriculum, schemes of work and individual lessons are sequenced and planned effectively. The curriculum is robust, ambitious, and ensures plentiful examples of enrichment opportunities including trips, visitors and themed days. Eight concepts run through all areas of the curriculum: language rich, imagination, celebration, curiosity, valuing equality, being active, purposeful and outdoor learning – see separate subject pages for more detail.

We use the National Curriculum (for Year 1 to 6) and Development Matters (for EYFS) to provide the content and framework for what we teach to ensure that coverage is broad and balanced and that key knowledge is securely understood. This enables our children to make links across their learning as they progress through the school. This starts from the time our children join us, ensuring that learning is a cohesive journey from Early Years through to Year 6.

We focus on the quality of our teaching, positive relationships between children and adults and between children and their peers as well as embedding high expectations, to ensure that our children receive a broad and balanced curriculum. This allows them to develop resilience, ambition and a confidence in themselves that will remain with them for many years to come. Our curriculum is ambitious for all pupils. In every subject, teachers expertly identify any barriers to learning for pupils and overcome these. Our expectation is that teachers will adapt the curriculum to meet the needs of all learners ensuring challenge and scaffolded support for learning wherever necessary.

Our early year’s curriculum is carefully constructed and highly effective in developing the youngest children’s learning and personal development. The curriculum introduces children in Nursery and Reception Years to key English and mathematics vocabulary and early concepts, which supports them for future learning. Teaching of phonics across the school is robust. We are fortunate enough to have longstanding experienced EYFS practitioners who work full time with our reception classes.

Our curriculum is underpinned by our 5 core values of Respect, Kindness, Safety, Aspiration and Courage and 13 learning journey skills that are introduced in EYFS and developed throughout the school represented by animals such as the cat (encourage questions) the bee (work together and independently) and the unicorn (to be imaginative). These are threaded through all learning and form part of our teaching/learning and behaviour policy. We want our pupils to leave Carden with these core value and skills embedded in order to prepare them for the next stage of their learning.

Learning outside is a priority for us. We have amazing school grounds that are used all year round regardless of the weather. Each classroom has direct access to outdoor space where learning takes place daily. Our Outdoor Learning classroom is timetabled and used for curriculum work, team building activities, whole class rewards and gardening club. Our fields, ponds and environmental rainscape area provide us with lots of unique cross-curricular learning opportunities.

We are a Gold Mark Sports provision school and one of only five schools in the city with Farm School status, twinned with Balmer Farm for various activities throughout the year for different year groups. Our KS2 classes all work with IntoUni, an organisation to help young people aspire to be the best versions of themselves.

Pupils’ personal development is a particular strength of our curriculum as identified by OFSTED. Our commitment to equality and diversity lies at the heart of all we do and underpins pupils’ learning. Our curriculum is extremely diversified in terms of ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and reflect our diverse demographic. A third or our pupils are non-white British. All children can see people like themselves represented throughout all subjects at different times of the year. Our approach to Black History was used as an exemplar across other Brighton and Hove schools.  We encourage pupils and their families to engage with each other in school events throughout the year such as our Eid family picnic, fireworks night, Diwali celebrations and various PTA events.

Our curriculum meets the specific needs of our children, taking into account their life experiences, backgrounds and varied starting points. We intentionally plan learning activities which build up pupils’ cultural capital by providing a rich range of experiences, texts, vocabulary, knowledge and skills. We develop the vocabulary of our pupils, teaching them previously unknown vocabulary, key words and language structures that they can then apply across the curriculum. We also provide a range of extra-curricular activities that enable our children to learn in different situations and beyond the curriculum subjects. Last academic year, 35 clubs were offered (22 sports and 13 non-sports) which included dance, Lego, board games, football, coding, gardening, golf, skateboarding and music. We encourage all pupils to take part in at least one enrichment activity.

Our Activity Passports encourage pupils to take part in many exciting and interesting activities both in an out of school. A list of twenty activities (6 completed as home learning tasks) develop a curiosity about the world. We our want pupils to be imaginative, motivated and to enjoy being outdoors. We want them to be confident, happy and successful learners.

All aspects of our curriculum help pupils become citizens of the future. We want our young people to make positive contributions to their community upholding British and Carden Core Values during their time with us and in the next stage of their learning and into adulthood. Many of our pupils choose to stay in touch when they leave updating us on their exciting experiences at university, global travel adventures and successful careers in a multitude of different workplaces.

Our learning journey consists of a set of skills that we want all children to be able to develop in order to be successful learners for each stage of their learning and for when they leave us. The skills are hooked to an animal which helps to the younger children to remember the skills needed to learn, achieve and thrive.