Curriculums

At Milldown our provision for the education of our children is centered around three key curriculums.  These are:

• Our bespoke Character Curriculum - is designed to support children's personal and social growth, with a focus on resilience and confidence. 
• Our bespoke World Curriculum, focused on 6 themes - is designed to give the children a thorough, age-appropriate understanding of the world and its workings.
• The National Curriculum - that gives the children the essential knowledge and skills needed to progress through the curriculum from EYFS, Key Stage 1, Key Stage 2, ensuring they are ready for the next steps at secondary school. 

The combination of these three curricula allows the living out of our school vision "I am the way and the truth and the life", John 14:6. 

Milldown CE Academy is committed to providing a place of excellence and ambition, where children’s personal development and academic success are nurtured through fun and engaging learning. The school aims to provide inspirational experiences through the curriculum so that children’s curiosity and individuality grows. At Milldown, children love learning and are happy and kind. Working in partnership with the whole school community, all at Milldown feel safe and empowered to succeed.

Academic Excellence, Social Intelligence, Creativity and Community are at the heart of everything we do. We give each of these pillars equal weighting and through a knowledge-rich curriculum, engaging teaching, great relationships and strong partnerships, we work hard to ensure that Milldown is the best possible primary school experience for every learner. The purpose of our teaching and learning policy is to ensure that:

• There is a high standard of teaching and learning in all classes
• There is consistency of practice within and between year groups
• There is a shared belief in the way teachers teach and children learn
• Everybody is clear about the roles they fulfill
• There is equality of access and opportunity for all children
• There is a clear understanding of how the school’s ethos is evident in practice

The success and progress of our learners often depend on the careful consideration and planning of lessons or learning sequences. Our well-structured mastery lesson design supports effective content delivery, which promotes learning and enhances student outcomes.

Comprehensive subject knowledge is fundamental to our planning process, enabling teachers to implement strategies for 'support' (for those requiring extra assistance to achieve their goals) and strategies for 'stretch' (for those seeking to exceed their current achievements). Lessons are strategically planned to ensure that all learning time is productive and that progress aligns with the intended learning objectives.

Lesson Planning

At Milldown we believe that effective lessons stem from thorough planning, as well as careful lesson preparation. We utilise various schemes, whether purchased, developed internally or within our Trust, meaning that teachers may sometimes deliver lessons crafted by others, whether colleagues or external providers. Additionally, teachers often revisit and reuse plans from previous years, which is why we emphasise both lesson preparation and planning.

The first step in creating effective lessons is ensuring a solid understanding of the content, along with clarity on how it will be delivered. A crucial aspect of adaptive teaching is being attentive to the reactions and needs of learners during lessons. We aim to empower teachers to observe more keenly and comprehensively and to ask targeted questions as they instruct. To effectively perceive and understand classroom dynamics, we believe that careful lesson planning is essential. Well-prepared lessons free up cognitive resources, allowing teachers to focus more on observation.

Every phase of a lesson is significant and presents opportunities to advance learning. By planning and preparing lessons, teachers can enhance their impact. This includes formulating essential questions, selecting the most effective techniques for gauging retention from past lessons, and identifying the best models to clarify widespread misconceptions. These are just a few examples of the myriad decisions teachers face during lessons. By contemplating these elements during the planning and preparation stage, we help alleviate the cognitive load on teachers.

Our goal is to offer staff the chance to collaborate with their colleagues in lesson planning. Lesson preparation involves revisiting the plan and thoughtfully determining what is needed to maximise its effectiveness for the specific class. While this is a complex aspect of Teaching and Learning, it is crucially important.

We focus on a Ruthless Simplicity and Inclusive by Design approach to our teaching.

Core 10 for Teaching and Learning 

Our fundamental principles for teaching and learning are closely aligned to Steplab's Core Steps Sequence. These principles play a significant role in planning learning opportunities, delivering instruction, and assessing student understanding.

The Core Sequence moves from broad to deep. It starts with broad areas of teaching – principles – down through more specific classroom goals and finishes at precise, granular action steps. The Core Sequence is designed to be thorough: it covers a great many of the key areas of effective classroom teaching, no matter the subject or age range.  Milldown's Core 10 can be found here. 

What is a Principle?

The sequence is built from six central principles. Each principle is built around a fundamental learning problem: a classroom problem that is universal for teachers – no matter their subject or age range - and intrinsic to the process of teaching. Every teacher spends their entire career addressing these problems, and as such they are the most appropriate foundation for any T&L sequence. The six principles are as follows:

• Create a Culture - has the teacher created culture with explicit, consistent teaching of behaviors so students are free to focus on learning?
• Secure attention - has the teacher got students’ attention?
• Optimise communication - is the teacher presenting ideas in a way that is manageable for students?
• Drive thought - is the teacher pushing students to think hard about ideas?
• Gather and give feedback - is the teacher assessing student learning and responding appropriately?
• Ensure consolidation - is the teacher supporting the students to consolidate their learning

Further details on these six core principles can be found here.

Our Core 10 Toolkit

At Milldown CE Primary School, our goal is to stay well-informed about effective teaching and learning strategies and pedagogical practices. We view our approaches to teaching and learning as ‘evidence-informed,’ while also embracing the wealth of ‘experience-informed’ practices that exist within our school.

When making decisions about teaching and learning, we often refer to cognitive science principles. It's essential to grasp how concepts like over-learning and Cognitive Load Theory influence the learning process, ensuring that we implement strategies backed by the science of learning. We have worked hard to create a coherent approach to Teaching and Learning, and in particular to codify and decompose what great teaching looks like with our context. We strive to equip teachers with techniques that they can apply within their classroom contexts, ensuring they understand not just which techniques are most effective but the confidence and understanding of when to use them and why.

We have drawn upon best practice within Milldown and our Trust as well as assimilating techniques from well resarched sources. The strategies/techniques implemented in the classroom to enhance learning are frequently drawn from Doug Lemov's Teach Like a Champion, as well as Tom Sherrington and Oliver Caviglioli's Teaching Walkthrus series. These work alongside the Core Sequence which we have adapted from Steplab.

These techniques form a significant part of our Teaching and Learning Toolkit. These techniques are covered and practised in our weekly CPL sessions and then implemented in classrooms with feedback given.

For each strand of the Core Sequence we have mapped out specific techniques we want teachers to learn, practice, apply.