Curriculum

Creative Caring Daring

At Great Hockham Primary School and Nursery, we are highly ambitious for each of our children as individuals. We believe passionately that every child should be seen as having unique talents, skills, interests and needs. As a result, we have carefully designed our curriculum (which is regularly reviewed in collaboration with the children) so that they may thrive academically, socially and emotionally. The size of our school means that all children are known well by all staff and by each other, leading to a team which works collaboratively towards these goals. At the heart of all we do is a culture of caring, celebration of success and a relentless drive for excellence in our provision.

All our lessons are inspired by what we call ‘The Great Hockham Way’. Details of this can be seen below. We see our role as one where ‘ownership’ of the learning transfers from teaching staff to children through an “I do, We do, You do” approach. There are fundamental aspects of teaching and learning embedded across all lessons and in all classes; aspects such as fluency and retrieval practice, a focus on vocabulary, and opportunities to discuss ideas collaboratively. We carefully analyse the needs of individual children and whole classes to ensure that all learning needs are met through thoughtful adaptations, enabling all children to flourish and achieve in their learning environment.

Enriching our curriculum are trips, visits and visitors, augmenting children’s understanding and providing relevance, context and excitement. Each half term has a ‘Spotlight Day’ where a subject is explored and celebrated in depth, with a subject specialist providing extra excitement and opening the children’s eyes to wider opportunities.

The Great Hockham Way
 

Retrieval

Based on Rosenshine’s principles of instruction and Willingham’s ideas about fluency and drilling, pupils can improve their confidence and fluency with a wide range of knowledge and physical skills through engaging in retrieval practice. An aspect of this is the connection between thinking and memory and how this practice supports storing and retrieving information from their long-term memory, tackling the ever- present problem that forgetting is all too easy.
 

Modelling

Based on Willingham’s, Wiliam’s and Berger and Shimanmura’s work, effective teaching is the process of enabling pupils to develop their knowledge and understanding of concepts and processes and the ability to apply their learning to a range of situations. This is best done when teachers walk through a learning process themselves, showing pupils how to do things, highlighting key procedures and the thinking that underpins them so pupils explicitly understand the decisions that were made and reasons behind them before attempting their own work.
 

Scaffolding
Based on Rosenhine’s principles of instruction that the most effective teachers provide scaffolds for difficult tasks. Rather than setting lower expectations for pupils, scaffolds support them in reaching ambitious goals through guiding them along the way. When the pupil is ready, the level of support decreases, until it is finally taken away and they can complete the task independently. It is only temporary and should not be relied on in the long term. A classic sequence of scaffolding is: I do it; We do it; You do it. 
 

Questioning & Feedback

 
Based on research by Wiliam, Leahy, Lyon and Thompson that teaching should be adaptive to the learner’s needs. A teacher’s role is to engage in ‘responsive teaching’ whereby their instructional inputs and interactions with pupils needs to adapt and respond, depending on how the learning is going. Teachers should use a range of effective questioning and feedback techniques that help all pupils to move forward, deepening their understanding or gaining fluency.
 

Oral Rehearsal & Vocabulary

Based on a wide range of evidence from the EEF and others, in order for pupils to become fluent in the use of complex subject-specific terminology and more general vocabulary, the process of learning new words needs to be considered deliberately and explicitly as part of teacher instruction. Our practice is: Say it, define it, use it, ensuring there are regular opportunities for retrieval practice.
 

The following information details our curriculum provision across Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. As our classes are mixed age classes, there is a 2-year rolling programme in place.

Details of the English and Maths curricula can be found in the English and Maths pages.

Here is a summary of how our school delivers music education to all our pupils across three areas – curriculum music, co-curricular provision and musical experiences – and what changes we are planning in future years. This information is to help pupils and parents or carers understand what our school offers and who we work with to support our pupils’ music education.

If you would like any further information about our school curriculum please email us at office@hockham.set.education