Inclusion in the Curriculum at Alderbrook

 What our curriculum is designed to do:

At Alderbrook Primary School we recognise that a curriculum has to be broad, balanced and offer pupils opportunities to grow as individuals as well as learners. We want our children to be curious, tenacious and collaborative.

 It’s important to all of us that our children enjoy their learning and that they are well prepared for life beyond Alderbrook. To make these things possible we offer our children as many challenging and exciting experiences as we can; activities within and outside the school timetable that build curiosity, teach tenacity and encourage collaboration.

 We understand that pupils must be challenged in their schooling; learning from failure and celebrating success. To this end, we encourage a positive growth mindset in everyone and develop this essential way of viewing the world and themselves. Running closely alongside this are the important topics of healthy living, good mental health and wellbeing. We want our curriculum to be empowering, enabling pupils to achieve academic success and independence whilst developing their personal and interpersonal skills in a creative learning environment.

 The curriculum offer:

 The staff of Alderbrook are hard-working and committed to providing all pupils with the best education we can offer. We strive to achieve academic excellence and our results over time and across all phases provide evidence of this. We see potential in every pupil and our curriculum is designed to encourage all children to flourish.

 We are determined that our pupils achieve high standards in the core subjects and that they leave us for secondary school with the best possible outcomes. This will also provide them with the opportunity to flourish as young adults and learners and we hope that it also prepares them well for the workplace and the many challenges that they will face in the future.

 Additional support for SEND and disadvantaged pupils is offered to pupils of all ages according to their identified needs, should they require it. Performance data is reviewed regularly to inform decisions about intervention and targeted support is offered within class by teachers and teaching assistants.

 Such interventions are tailor made to meet the needs of each individual or small group and carefully timetabled to ensure that children still access a range of wider curriculum subjects.  Many pupils are supported by teaching assistants, trained by the SENCo to deliver intervention programmes specific to each identified need. The school works closely with parents to understand and better meet pupils’ needs, and parents are supported by the school to work with their children to maximise progress and achievement. 

 Equal opportunities in Curriculum

 Our wellbeing provision for children also includes careful consideration of how best we can meet their personal, social, health and emotional needs through the curriculum and therefore we devote time to many important topics that fall within the remit of PSHE such as dealing with prejudice and intolerance in all its many and varied complex forms (eg. homophobia, racism, bullying, etc.). The staff at Alderbrook regularly receive CPD to support equal opportunities including how to support LGBTQ+ children and families.  Our Relationships and Sex Education programme compliments the above, helping children to understand their own development and how to adopt healthy relationships.

 A curriculum has to reflect the community that it serves for children to be engaged – they need to see how it is relevant too.  Our curriculum has been carefully planned to ensure that our diverse community is reflected in it.  The table below shows how our divers community are celebrated across Alderbrook and through our children mentally travel the world..  The authors on our reading lists come from a range of ethnicities which enables all children within our community to feel represented.  Another important adaptation to our curriculum to make it relevant is the running theme of ‘London’ throughout.  As an Inner London school, this gives all our children context to their environment, provides them with a ‘hook’ for their learning and makes it meaningful to them. 

 Alderbrook’s learning principles, which support all children including those with barriers to learning:

 Concrete resources available to support learning

• Develop oracy skills through models such as stem sentences, modelling and displaying vocabulary
• Opportunities for children to choose how they best communicate their learning
• Our low threshold, high ceiling approach ensures that all children can access their learning at an appropriate level while continuing to be challenged
• Personalised and/or modified resources to suit individual needs (eg. Wobble cushion, behaviour plans, reward systems etc)
• High staff to pupil ratio allows for high quality feedback
• SLT and class teachers rigorously monitor SEND progress and achievement in the curriculum to ensure all areas of need and support are identified
• Every class has a visual timetable
• Our co-constructed success criteria approach enables all children to activity participate in understanding their learning
• Opportunities for peer review develop confidence in reflecting on their achievement against the learning objective
• Mixed attainment teaching ensuring there are no glass ceilings and children can reach their full potential
• Differentiated high quality questioning, effective feedback and opportunities for children to deepen their understanding through dive deeper challenges
• Our learning partner approach gives children the opportunity to explain learning to others
• The school day is structured in a way that maximises learning in the curriculum

 English as an additional language

Sometimes a child’s barrier to accessing the curriculum is that they are new to English or have English as an additional language.  Through our induction procedure we ascertain information on children’s language background to ensure we plan to meet the child’s needs upon arrival.  All teachers engage in the regular assessment of each child’s level of English language acquisition.  We ensure that new vocabulary is clearly taught and idioms are carefully explained.  Where rapid language acquisition is required to engage in the curriculum, additional bespoke resources are implemented by the class teacher with support of the English as an Additional Language leader in consultation with parents.

Promoting positive mental health in the curriculum

We run cognition lessons for children, helping them to better understand their own thinking and strategies that best help them to achieve according to their potential. Staff model this process within class providing the children with a better understanding of how to apply it to their own learning. This approach, together with growth mindset, has many benefits for children. We want all our children to recognise that they can achieve as well as their peers, regardless of their backgrounds.

Mental Health and Wellbeing are important aspects of school life at Alderbrook and we have a three year mental health strategy which determines our direction.  We teach about growth mindset and cognition, guiding pupils to better understand how they learn and to recognise that we all learn differently and that making mistakes is an important part of the learning process. We are continuously looking at ways to improve the wellbeing of all members of our school community: pupils, staff and parents (eg. Parent Gym, Emotional Literacy Support Assistant (ELSA) sessions, Nurture Group, coffee mornings) to ensure that our school is the best it can be in enabling all members to flourish and be happy.