Academy Curriculum

Curriculum Intent

At Buckingham Primary Academy we have designed a purposeful, inspiring, broad and aspirational curriculum.

Our curriculum has been designed to shape and enable our children to have the confidence and resilience to use their existing knowledge and skills to acquire new knowledge and develop new skills to becoming confident, responsible and successful learners in the 21st Century.

At Buckingham Primary Academy we have developed an accessible and inclusive curriculum for ALL with a wide range of enquiry questions, high aspirations and a belief to achieve through collaboration. There is a clear progression of skills from when a child starts to when a child leaves at the end of primary in readiness for secondary education. Our curriculum provides connections and webs of knowledge through careful task design.

Our children’s cultural capital is varied as our children come from a wide range of backgrounds. Our curriculum aims to close the cultural capital gap for the most disadvantaged children in our community. This will enable ALL our children to actively contribute to the community and their wider society in a positive way.

Our children will leave Buckingham Primary Academy with personal pride and respect for one another. Our children will have a deepened understanding and the emotional intelligence to keep themselves and their community safe in an ever changing society.

A 3D Curriculum

Our school’s curriculum design and model is that of a ‘3D Curriculum’. This focusses on making links or connections between different topics and year groups rather than studying topics in isolation. There are three main types of link:

• Horizontal Links: between subjects in a year
• Vertical Links: within a subject year on year
• Diagonal Links: between year groups and subjects.

Children have the opportunity to deepen their understanding by building on their webs of knowledge and applying it to deepen their knowledge. The link below shows how our knowledge rich enquiry topics have been mapped out across Foundation Stage, KS1 and KS2 to create purposeful and connective webs of knowledge for all our children at Buckingham Primary Academy.

Our school curriculum draws on the National Curriculum (2014) but has been adapted considerably to suit our learners in our community including closing the gap for our most disadvantaged children.

In each year group, the following subjects are taught daily:

• English
• SPaG
• Phonics in FS and KS1 (Little Wandle Phonics scheme is followed and more can be read about this within the Phonics Intention Statement below)
• Mathematics
• Arithmetic

These subjects are taught each week:

• Science
• Computing
• Physical Education
• PSHE and emotional intelligence (we follow the Jigsaw scheme and more can be read below under the PSHE Overview)

The rest of the curriculum is blocked into enquiry topics which are knowledge – rich and based around the following subjects:

• History
• Geography
• RE
• Art and Design
• Music
• MfL

If you would like more information on our curriculum please visit us and ask to speak to Miss Hillman, Principal or Mrs Thorpe, Vice-Principal. We are very excited and proud of our curriculum and we would be happy to answer any questions you may have.