Our curriculum has always had our children's interests at the heart of it, and our current unique offer aims to ensure that every single child flourishes at every stage of their learning here with us, linking to our Christian vision that having faith in, and achieving, all of these small building blocks over time will lead to better outcomes for all of our pupils.
With this in mind, our staff collectively designed our curriculum aims and objectives to fall within these four categories:

Being        Belonging        Growing        Experimenting

The details of these aims are explained here in our curriculum intent document. 

At Orford we rarely rely on published schemes of work and have always preferred to tailor our topics so that they are unique to our children, their interests and our local community and parish. 

Having mixed age classes means our Long Term Planning runs on a 2/3 year cycle (depending on the class). We are currently on Cycle A for class 1, and Cycle C for classes 2/3:

Subject leaders have worked incredibly hard to create curriculum maps and knowledge organisers to break the knowledge and skills down further. More information about curriculum maps and knowledge organisers can be found by clicking here.

All of our curriculum maps were designed around a spiral model with all key ideas and skills being revisited and built on at regular intervals through each key stage and class. Where topics were non-statutory, subject leaders chose those where our children could have meaningful, hands-on opportunities (many outside of the classroom) whilst also teaching them about social and cultural differences and diversity.

Some examples of units chosen specifically for our children include: programming with LegoWeDo, learning local history and geographical enquiry through the Anglo Saxons at Sutton Hoo and whole class ukulele teaching. Wherever possible, themes are dovetailed across the curriculum (and sometimes across classes), to create extra opportunities to embed knowledge and skills.

Our SIAMs inspection found: 

"The school has a broad and balanced curriculum, strongly guided at all times by its vision where pupils ‘lead their learning’. The curriculum nurtures and provides the learning that each pupil requires to flourish, and adds to their spiritual development. Leaders develop each pupil’s creativity through discovery and play in a supportive environment. Pupils feel safe and secure and are then able to build their personal resilience skills to cope with external pressures such as testing."

Visiting Headteachers to our school (Nov 22) praised our children's enthusiasm and pride in their work. Our children readily accept challenges in their work and have sufficient knowledge to apply to problems. 

Over 80% of our children make at least expected progress across both key stages in reading, writing and maths.