Curriculum
Our curriculum has been designed to ensure a broad and balanced coverage across all subjects. Throughout a child’s learning journey in our school, all National Curriculum expectations will be covered. In fact, due to careful sequencing of curriculum content, we exceed these expectations in each subject.
We have worked with partner schools across the Harris Federation and with a team of subject specialists to build our own curriculum. Subjects are taught discretely and weekly to support children in remembering the key knowledge and skills. We also have a team of speciliast subject teachers for P.E, Art and Mandarin.
Reading is at the heart of everything we do at Beckenham. We know that if children develop in to confident and secure readers then this unlocks learning across the curriculum and will hopefully lead to a real love of reading. We follow the Read Write Inc phonics programme when children first join our academy and then once they have secured their skills in decoding, we focus on developing reading comprehension in a range of high quality, diverse books.
In each subject we have a mastery mindset. This means that we have high expectations for every single child and we scaffold and support all children to be able to meet these expectations. We want children to make real and meaningful links in their learning and so we encourage them to reflect on their prior knowledge and understanding and consider how this can help them to deepen their understanding. We actively encourage dialogue about learning and encourage children to articulate their knowledge and understanding in a range of contexts.
SMSC and British Values are threaded throughout our curriculum so that they become an integral part of our curriculum planning and implementation.
A link to our curriculum intent statement is below. This outlines our hopes and aspirations for all children by the time they leave our academy. Our curriculum coverage outlines how curriculum coverage helps us to implement our intent.
We welcome visitors to our academy and encourage you to come and talk to our children about their learning and life at our academy.
High standards in every classroom
As part of the Harris Federation, which has its own training school for teachers, our staff receive outstanding professional development to make sure that standards are consistently high in every classroom.
Children treated as individuals
We want children to retain their individuality and we nurture them as individuals.
We step in quickly if a change is needed. For some children, this might involve one-to-one support if they are finding something difficult and for others it could mean challenging them further with their learning.
We welcome children of all abilities and want them to enjoy school and thrive. For children with special educational needs, one of our first steps is to work with their parents and other specialists to create a plan for supporting them. Our approach as a whole is reviewed with children’s classroom teachers, relevant specialists and parents each term.
An academic head start
As they progress through the school, children will begin to be taught by specialist subject teachers, just like in secondary school. They will also be taken by their teachers to use specialist facilities such as science laboratories at Harris Academy Beckenham.
As well as engaging them in the excitement of the subject at hand, these experiences help prepare children for a successful transition to secondary school.
