As in other state schools, all the children of statutory school age at Allington Primary School follow the National Curriculum. This means they follow nationally agreed programmes of study in maths, English, science, information communication technology, art, music, PE, history, geography and design and technology. In addition to the subjects specified in the National Curriculum, the school curriculum also includes religious education and cross-curricular issues such as personal and social education, health education, environmental education, equal opportunities and multi-cultural education.
How We Organise Learning
During the school year, each class's work is planned around a series of topics or units of work, lasting half a term or a term. The topics are organised so that all areas of the National Curriculum are included over the year.
Classroom displays focus on aspects of the topic and we try hard to make classroom work interesting and meaningful to children. Children are also encouraged to bring items from home into school in order to enrich their topic work. We hope children will experience memorable learning activities each week of their school life.
As well as work related to the class topic, children also work on specific subject areas. In particular there will be ongoing activities in maths and English - talking, listening, reading and writing.
Within the classroom, particularly in the Infants, different activities will often be taking place at the same time. One group of children might be carrying out a scientific investigation, whilst other groups are writing, doing maths or making a design. At other times of the day all children will be doing a similar activity at the same time – for example PE, music or reading. When a variety of activities is taking place, teachers will normally be working with groups of children or individual children. Children are encouraged to work both independently and collaboratively in a group, according to the task in which they are involved.
Children progress through the levels of the National Curriculum at their own rate. Their progress is carefully checked by teachers and at the ages of 7 and 11 their progress is also monitored by nationally organised assessments (SATs).