Curriculum

Curriculum Rationale

There are five drivers that are central to our curriculum plan. Porthleven’ s curriculum plan is designed to promote:

• Resilient individuals: We want pupils whose individual resilience, behaviours, thoughts, and actions promote positive attitude to learning, personal wellbeing and mental health. They are taught to use
  positive emotions to bounce back from negative emotional experiences. (There are no mistakes only learning opportunities.) We see a need in our pupils to accept challenge in their learning and understanding.
• Respectful communicators: Pupils are taught to assert their views and listen to the views of others. World Citizens We teach children to become aware of and understand the wider world and their
  place in it.
• Healthy advocates Children are taught to be passionate about health and well being. In themselves and others. We want our children to be able to raise awareness of health topics and contribute to a
  positive well-being culture in our school.
•  Oracy and the acquisition vocabulary is taught explicitly, consistently and progressively. We want our pupils to be able to express themselves well. To have the vocabulary to say what they want to say
  and the ability to structure their thoughts so that they make sense to others.

These drivers are chosen to raise aspirations within our community. We know that children enter the school below national expectations and although we are not in a deprived area, many families work in
seasonal occupations in low income jobs. Consequently, many of children lack quality time with their parents: siblings, other parents or carers drop off and collect a number of our children; and time spent
with parents over the holidays is limited. We have anecdotal conversations where families haven’t left Cornwall, been swimming or been to the beach. A number of our children are also split from significant
members of their families; brothers, sisters, fathers, aunts, uncles or grandparents, which negatively impacts their resilience and well-being.

We teach children to be outward looking by providing experiences that would otherwise be beyond them.

Our curriculum exposes children to the thoughts and ideas of inspirational people who have had influence locally, nationally and globally. There is a strong community spirit, but aspirations are low due
to the community’s coastal and rural isolation. We therefore teach children what it means to live in modern Britain.

The Porthleven Wheel defines the characteristics that we value and are a focus for our curriculum. We want every child to develop to lead successful and fulfilling lives.

We recognise early language and reading as a vitally important part of a child’s learning. Once children are able to read we develop a love of reading and the reading skills through a progressive reading
journey across the school. Where appropriate, we have linked these texts to areas of learning across the school. Not only are these mapped in terms of subject but also genre and cultural diversity.

Reading and the study of a wide range of texts is fundamental vehicle to improve children’s communication and therefore we have chosen high quality texts to enrich and develop a love of reading.