Rationale:

Our curriculum is underpinned by our five core values, supporting pupils' academic and personal development, making learning and knowledge gain meaningful, developing pupils’ character and preparing them to be successful Eskdalers now and into the future. We achieve this by introducing pupils to the idea of our ‘Think like a..’ approach to their learning, enabling them to become a little more ‘expert’.

‘Think like a…’, including talk, write and read like a Computational Thinker is central to pupils learning and designed to develop pupil oracy and vocabulary skills to enable them to use computational language meaningfully when talking about computing.

When reading like a Computational Thinker, pupils have opportunities to read across the curriculum to support the knowledge and vocabulary to be gained in the subject of Computing.

When ‘Thinking like a Computational Thinker’, pupils will acquire knowledge, and enable them to skilfully attempt and apply their understanding.

Computing is taught across four concepts: Technology, Creativity (Media and Data), Programming and Online, thus allowing our children to grow as digital citizens. Throughout their primary journey, they will develop an increasing understanding of the technology around them, they will begin to know its limitations, learn how to stay safe online and use it to create purposeful, digital content. They will be taught the substantive knowledge required to be successful within each of these concepts, alongside the crucial computational disciplinary knowledge.

To ensure that pupils are equipped with the knowledge and skills to explore, learn and create their own digital work, think computationally and develop a more rigorous understanding of the digital world. Computing is taught through the school’s process models.

• Explore – involves the children looking at the software/hardware and trying to decide what it will do.
• Master – this aspect is about mastering the skills needed to apply to the next stages
• Design, make and modify – design, make and continually modify their own work.
• Evaluate - did it fit the design brief? What will I do differently next time? What else would I like to learn?

However, the teaching of programming needs a more specialise approach and so the school have adopted the PRIMM process model:

• Predict – children discuss the program and predict what it might do
• Run – children run the program so that they can test their predictions and discuss
• Investigate – the children explore the structure of the code
• Modify – children are asked to change the functionality of the code via a sequence of increasingly more challenging exercises
• Make – children design a new program using the same structure but solves a new problem

The teaching of online safety adopts the school's PSHE process model.

The teaching of computing is delivered through our method of teaching (pedagogy), which incorporates meta-cognitive strategies to enable all pupils to retain the learning of knowledge. This is typically applied by:

• Activating Prior Knowledge
• Small step teaching delivery
• Independent practice
• Feedback

How we adapt the Computing Curriculum for SEND Pupils

As part of our quality first approach to teaching, we use a range of strategies to support SEND pupils to access the Computing curriculum. The document below details examples of the adaptations that are made to support pupils in class.

• Adaptive Teaching - Computing.pdf