Intent

We aspire for every child at Great Barton to develop a love of learning, by offering a rich, well-sequenced curriculum that ensures progression of key knowledge and skills.  We aim for children to build upon their individual strengths and talents and to become confident, independent, happy and healthy citizens. 

Our aim is for our school to become a place where we can all develop both spiritually and morally, in turn becoming better prepared for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of life.

One of the key values at Great Barton is promoting the belief that every child ‘can do’ great things in their lives.

Collective Worship

We are a church of England school and work closely with Holy Innocents' church in the village.  We focus a sequence of Christian values across two years in our collective worship sessions.

Music

The children are encouraged to play a musical instrument.    In year 4, the children all learn to play the clarinet as part of the Whole Class Music Ensemble teaching provided by the County Music Service.  For children who wish to continue to play the clarinet after year 4, pupils have the opportunity to "play on" throughout years 5 and 6.  Children regularly perform to the whole school in Collective Worship, participate in musical concerts and perform at special events during the school year e.g. playing at the Christingle Service. 

We have a school choir who sing a range of songs and enjoy singing to the rest of the school.

Sports

The school is a member of the Gipping Valley Sports Partnership.  This provides us with a number of benefits including access to inter-school competitions, coaches, before and after school sports activities, access to visits from Olympic athletes, training for our Play Leaders, a qualified and very experienced sports coach who provides CPD to all staff as well as high quality PE lessons.

Phonics teaching

We follow Little Wandle Letter and Sounds.

Reading Schemes

We use Little Wandle Letters and Sounds phonetically decodable books.  Once children have completed their phonics and early reading, we have a wide range of reading books and schemes to suit individual learners.

Reading culture

We have a new library in the school, which has an extensive range of non-fiction and fiction books.  We are in the process of auditing our texts to ensure that there continues to be diverse and offer examples of good role models.  Every child will bring home a book which is not phonetically de-codeable for their parents to read to them at home in order to encourage a love of learning.

To find out about curriculum planning for each year group, please click on the links below.