Curriculum

Curriculum Aims

Our vision for Portway Junior School is to be the pride of our community; to enable great progress for every pupil through expert teaching and a broad and balanced curriculum that prepares our pupils well for their futures. Our aim is for our school community to be positive, resilient learners who behave with integrity are dedicated to their learning and are encouraging of others.

Curriculum Offer

Our curriculum aims to help all our pupils to succeed across the curriculum and through a wide range of opportunities. Our aim is that every child thrives through our curriculum, learning relevant knowledge and skills while also developing confidence, self-assurance, self-worth and a sense of pride so that they will also become confident adults, achieving their full potential in the future. We pride ourselves in the strong relationships we have within the school and our wider school community and we are committed to ensuring that all children’s personal needs are met.

Our curriculum provides rich and memorable learning experiences through broad and balanced opportunities, including outdoor learning through Forest School lessons. We strive to ensure that every child has the knowledge, understanding and skills to achieve well in their next school and beyond as adults. We seek to develop every child’s aspirations so our Year 6 children graduate with a guest speaker from Winchester University, reminding them this is an option for their future. We ensure that all children can be successful and achieve in a wide range of areas. We have structured our curriculum to promote progression within year groups as well as across the key stage where they will also develop knowledge and skills in each curriculum area.

We deliver our curriculum through subject areas, taught in each year group. We want to develop the future writers, designers, artists, geographers, historians and so much more so it is important to us that children develop a strong understanding of the skills and knowledge of different subjects and value them all. Where appropriate, links are made to enrich learning and enable purposeful connections across subject areas. We are proud of the trips, visitors, clubs and special curriculum days that we offer. These further enhance the wider curriculum and children’s engagement in learning.

All aspects of our curriculum are accessible to all children, irrespective of their ethnic background, gender, disability, religious or linguistic background. We strive to meet the needs of all children, including those pupils with special educational needs, those with disabilities, those with higher attainment and children who are learning English as an additional language. A number of our families are military families and we are creative in our approach to supporting forces children. British Values are a prominent part of our school life, especially through our assemblies.

We support all our children in becoming effective learners and strive to instill a strong work ethic in them all, so that they can achieve their full potential. We take care to ensure our curriculum provides opportunities to develop social skills, learning attributes and positive attitudes so that the children enjoy their learning and see value in education.

We want our pupils to be positive, resilient, dedicated life-long learners and therefore offer a curriculum that is planned to inspire, challenge and engage. We have high expectations and our curriculum is designed to:

• Be ambitious for all pupils, enabling all to achieve their full potential
• Provide first-hand experiences and creative opportunities
• Develop key skills such as speaking and listening, resilience, integrity, encouragement, empathy, collaboration, critical thinking, research and enquiry, computing and the ability to make ready, respectful and safe choices
• Build on pupils’ prior learning, prepare them for their next stage of learning and for the diverse and technological world in which they will be citizens of the future.
• Promote the importance of good physical and mental health, exercise and personal well-being.
• Teach children skills and knowledge which they can apply where relevant

Year group leaflets are sent home each half term to inform parents of their child’s learning. These can also be accessed under the relevant year group tab at the top of the website.

Portway Junior School children transition well to Key Stage 3 because our transition offer is robust and our relationships with other schools in the community are strong. Our children are secondary ready and prepared for the next chapter of their education journey. They respect themselves as well as respecting others and this is shown through both their academic and personal progress and development. Safeguarding and our safeguarding curriculum is our first priority and children at Portway Junior leave us with a strong understanding of making safe choices. The Portway Code of being ready, respectful, and safe prepares our pupils for their future.

For more information about our curriculum offer, please contact Mr Anderson via the school office.