The curriculum
Our curriculum is designed to equip all children with the knowledge and skills that they require to successfully navigate their way through life as residents of South Manchester and as active global citizens. We also want to develop custodians of the environment. We have created a bespoke curriculum for the pupils of Old Moat that celebrates our rich diversity.
All aspects of school life are underpinned by our six values of Responsibility, Respect, Resilience, Fairness, Empathy and Kindness. Children are taught how to keep themselves happy and safe in the real and virtual world. They learn to recognise how they should be treated and how they should treat others through the UNICEF Rights Respecting charter. We follow the JIGSAW PSHE curriculum to teach children a sense of self and others and give them the tools they need to take care of their wellbeing and that of others.
Our humanities curriculum at Old Moat is centred around broad themes that we believe to be important in creating citizens of the world for the twenty-first century: Fairness; Community and Identity; Power and Government, Health and Education; Environment and Discovery. Each theme is visited at least once in each Key Stage and is revisited and built on. Our intention is that through these themes, our pupils in all their diversity will discover who they are and how they can become responsible members of our society.
There are “Big Questions” that drive the curriculum for science, humanities and RE. Our EYFS Big Questions are centred around the child, but are linked to our wider themes and have bridging links to the rest of the school’s curriculum. The sequencing of our Big Questions is built on principles of cognitive science: there are bridges between the questions and we recall knowledge from previous teaching in order to help the knowledge "stick" and to deepen the understanding of concepts taught. Cross-curricular links are made, where appropriate, to enable children to apply their growing range of knowledge and skills in a variety of ways. We also strive to retain individual subject integrity so that knowledge and skills are progressed intentionally and tangible progress can be seen from year to year.
The Big Questions we have chosen reflect the National Curriculum but at the same time are carefully chosen to give our diverse pupils the cultural capital they need to navigate the world and to make them young people who can contribute to their community and to society at large. They promote crictical thinking.
Curriculum content is clearly visible in Knowledge Organisers. There are teacher versions, used as a tool in planning, and child-friendly versions which help children to see and remember the core knowledge and vocabulary from a topic (see downloads on subject pages for examples).
Central to all that we do is the development of language and reading across the curriculum. Children need to be able to decipher a wealth of information both in print and digitally and well-rounded reading and language skills across all subjects are critical to this.
If you would like to find out more about our curriculum, please email our curriculum lead, Miss Dhanda adhanda@oldmoat.manchester.sch.uk
