The Curriculum
The curriculum at Ferndale Community School is designed to provide all pupils with a high quality education appropriate to their needs in order to prepare them academically, socially and personally for the opportunities, challenges and responsibilities of further or higher education, employment and adult life.
The development of our Curriculum has been a 3-year journey that has involved consultation with pupils, staff, parents and governors.
Our Learning and Teaching vision, “Believe, Achieve, Succeed,” developed through consultation, has provided the ‘Ferndale Foundation Principles’; a set of consistent teaching approaches and strategies that pupils can expect in all curriculum areas.
The Ferndale Community School Curriculum takes into account the needs of all learners and offers a broad and balanced range of meaningful experiences allowing pupils to consider the part they play in their local community as well as the wider world.
Our curriculum will provide rich learning opportunities and authentic experiences to develop the key concepts, knowledge and integral skills as defined in the Statements of What Matters.
Four Purposes
Our curriculum will be designed, developed and delivered with the four purposes at the centre to ensure that pupils become.
- Ambitious, capable learners, ready to learn throughout their lives.
- Enterprising, creative contributors, ready to play a full part in life and work.
- Enterprising, informed citizens of Wales and the world.
- Healthy, confident individuals, ready to lead fulfilling lives as valued members of society.
These qualities are recognised and celebrated through our praise and reward system in the form of going the extra mile points that pupils can ‘spend’ in our school shop.
Areas of Learning and Experience
Our curriculum will provide learning which encompasses six areas of learning and experience. These are;
- Language, Literacy and communication
- Mathematics and Numeracy
- Expressive Arts
- Humanities
- Health and Wellbeing
- Science and technology
Each area of learning and experience has a predefined set of ‘what matters’ statements. These statements support pupils to make good progress by developing the skills and knowledge gained from their learning experiences from ages 3 – 16 . We have worked collaboratively with all of our cluster schools to ensure we have a continuum of learning, consistent assessment strategies and a shared philosophy.
Assessment
Assessment is a means of progressing learning. Therefore we need to assess on three levels that consider the relationship between curriculum, pedagogy and assessment, in order to inform our planning.
Assessment will:
- Support individual learners on an ongoing, day to day basis
- Identify, capture and reflect on individual learner progress over time
- Understand group progress in order to reflect on practice
All pupils will be assessed on entry to the school but assessment will continue to be a crucial aspect of our daily teaching and learning as information is used to plan the next steps in each individual pupils’ learning.
Cross Curricular Skills
Our curriculum at Ferndale Community School will develop the mandatory cross curricular skills of:
- Literacy
- Numeracy
- Digital Competency
Additionally, it will enable learners to develop competence and capability in these skills and to extend and apply them across all areas.
Learners will be given opportunities across the curriculum to:
- Develop listening, reading, speaking and writing skills
- Be able to use numbers and solve problems in real life situations
- Be confident users in a range of technologies to help them function and communicate effectively and make sense of the world.
Welsh Language skills will also be developed across all curriculum areas and within Welsh lessons throughout all year groups.
Through our curriculum, all pupils at Ferndale Community School will also be provided opportunities to develop the following integral skills:
- Creativity and innovation
- Critical thinking and problem solving
- Personal effectiveness
- Planning and organising
Review and refinement
Our school curriculum will be kept under review in order to respond to the outputs of professional inquiry, the changing needs of learners and social contexts. This will ensure our curriculum is both inclusive and responsive, meeting the needs of all learners. The reviews will take into account the views of stakeholders and will be signed off by the Governing Body.