Curriculum Overview

We teach the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) curriculum in our reception classes and the National Curriculum in Years 1 to 6. In addition to this we teach Personal, Social, Health Education and Citizenship (PSHEC) and Sex and Relationships Education. We follow Bromley’s Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education. All children learn to play the djembe drums in Year 3 and the recorder in Year 4.

Our aspiration for all our children to become successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens underpins our planning of the curriculum. We work hard to ensure that the children enjoy the curriculum offered, so we create schemes of work that will interest them. We recognise that our children are unique in their outlook and in their needs so we have some ‘key drivers’ for our curriculum. These are:

Our world; we encourage children to see themselves as global citizens
Enquiry and possibilities; we support children in thinking for themselves and problem-solving
Creativity; we find ways to develop children’s learning through the creative arts
Social and emotional awareness; we encourage children to look after their own and others well-being

We are proud of the awards linked to the curriculum that the school has achieved: Activemark for the school’s delivery of Physical Education, both during and outside curriculum time; Healthy Schools status in recognition of the work we undertake to promote healthy lifestyles; Artsmark Gold in recognition of our significant achievements in incorporating Art, Music, Dance and Drama across the curriculum; the International School Award for the school’s curriculum links, helping children to be aware of the world around them.

Please click on the related pages to the right of this page to download an overview of the curriculum for each subject, per year group.

Please click here for our curriculum overview statement.

Please click here for our Personal Development Statement.

Every year we invite famous authors into school to share their work and enthuse the children. Past visitors have included Michael Rosen, Anthony Browne, Valerie Bloom, Leigh Hobbs, Anne Fine and Timothy Knapman.

Educational visits

We believe that educational visits are a vital part of children’s learning. Every year group will visit at least one place related to their curriculum studies. Year 5 pupils visit Frylands, a nearby outdoor activity centre, for an overnight stay and our Year 6 pupils enjoy an action-packed residential trip to Hindleap Warren in the Ashdown Forest.

Phonics at Wickham Common

Our chosen systematic synthetic programme is Read Write Inc. Please follow the links below for more information on how the programme works and the learning opportunities that it offers our learners.

Why is it called Read Write Inc. and what is the programme about?

Parent video: Understanding Phonics

How to say the sounds

10 things to think about when you read to your child

Reading at Wickham Common

Reading is central to all we do in our school and the foundation upon which all learning is fundamentally built. As such, reading is a key part of our daily routines at Wickham Common.

Children who have completed the Phonics scheme take part in reading sessions every morning that explicitly teach the skills necessary to understand and engage with the texts they are studying. Across a five day cycle, children build their understanding by applying their retrieval and inference skills, analyse grammatical features and consider the wider meaning of what they have read. Texts covered during such sessions cover a range of genres and text types.

In addition to skills sessions, children are afforded the opportunities to apply these skills in greater depth when reading whole texts. Texts are mapped across the school to ensure that there is a sense of progression year-on-year and within an academic year group. These reading opportunities give children greater opportunities to engage with high-quality literature purposefully, for a sustained period of time which deepens their love of reading.

Reading for pleasure is also given a place of prominence at Wickham Common. Our library was refurbished in 2022 using funding raised by our PTA and is a well-resourced, welcoming space that is accessible to all pupils on a regular, timetabled basis. The Wickham Common Reading Podcast features children throughout the school passionately and eloquently discussing the books around a certain theme and usually includes contributions from well-known authors, illustrators and poets.

Maths at Wickham Common

To ensure that children gain an understanding of our number system, the importance of place value and why formal methods work, they are taught in a structured and progressive way. This mathematical fluency helps children to choose an appropriate strategy for the calculation given. For instance, it may be that a mental addition strategy is better suited than the formal column method. Children develop their skills with larger and more complex numbers (decimal, negatives, fractions etc.) as they move up the school.

Calculation Policy

At Wickham Common Primary School, the aim of our calculation policy is to ensure all children are taught according to the document, so they can be seamlessly built upon year after year, as the child moves through school. The policy has been taken from White Rose Maths. The use of concrete resources and visuals underpins this calculation policy.

The policy goes through:

Addition
Subtraction
Multiplication
Division

Each operation is broken down into skills for the year groups and shows recommended models and visuals to support the teaching of the corresponding concepts alongside.