PYP Curriculum Framework

At Marden Primary Academy, we believe every child deserves the right to a nurturing and caring community, whose shared vision is ambitious and uncompromising.

With an internationally-minded approach, we collectively challenge ourselves and one another, showing both support and resilience to continuously improve and achieve, in learning and in life.

Overview

The Primary Years Programme (PYP) is a transdisciplinary curriculum framework that offers authentic learning experiences.

The PYP encourages students to learn to appreciate knowledge, conceptual understandings, skills and personal attributes as a connected whole.

PROGRAMMES OF INQUIRY Core Text Overview

IB World School …

Our curriculum covers all the requirements of the National Curriculum but is arranged around inquiries into six different Transdisciplinary Themes. Marden Primary Academy is an IB World School, authorised to deliver the International Baccalaureate (IB) Primary Years Programme.

The International Baccalaureate® aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect.

To this end the organization works with schools, governments and international organizations to develop challenging programmes of international education and rigorous assessment.

These programmes encourage students across the world to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand that other people, with their differences, can also be right.

Overview of the pyp framework

At Marden Primary Academy, our aim is to constantly raise standards and expectations in all aspects of teaching and learning. We believe that only with outstanding teaching and learning, can we fully cater for the needs of the children in our care and help them reach their full potential. We believe in setting the highest expectations for all children irrespective of ability, gender, EAL and SEND.

Our method of subject leadership using the hub leadership framework ensures that children discover a love for discrete subjects whilst learning through a transdisciplinary approach.

Our curriculum develops children’s intercultural understanding and respect, through an inquiry-based ideology. We go beyond the minimum expectations of the National Curriculum, providing opportunities to apply their knowledge and skills obtained, to bring about meaningful change in ourselves and others.

Our ambitious, challenging and contemporary curriculum exceeds the minimum expectations of the National Curriculum through the implementation of the IB PYP framework. Our children develop their knowledge and skills through a broad and balanced curriculum as National Curriculum objectives are interwoven into units of inquiry, with plentiful opportunities to apply this in context through lines of inquiry. Our curriculum is sequenced around the following six themes:

Who we are
How we express ourselves
Where we are in place and time

How the world works
How we organise ourselves
Sharing the planet

The way that we plan for this 21st century curriculum has collaboration at its core, working not only with colleagues at Marden Primary Academy, but also with colleagues across Leigh Academies Trust. This enables us to draw on subject knowledge expertise from across our teaching and learning community.

Through our ambitious curriculum, we develop learners that are:

Inquirers
Knowledgeable
Thinkers
Communicators
Principled

Open-minded
Caring
Risk-takers
Balanced
Reflective

Considered planning and robust assessment strategies ensure that all children make appropriate progress and master concepts. Rigorous monitoring of curriculum coverage and teaching will ensure that the challenge to deliver highly effective outcomes is ever-present. All teachers will undertake an active role in the development and deployment of our unified curriculum via our Hub Leadership framework, ensuring complete coverage and consistency across all year groups.

We develop maths mastery, using White Rose Maths. This builds a culture of deep understanding, confidence and competence in maths that produces strong, secure learning and progress. The framework provides consistency in teaching and learning as well as ensuring the complete coverage of all skills across all year groups.

Our children learn to read and write using a systematic synthetic phonics approach via Phonics International. They begin to explore meaning through Reading Rainbow and deepen their understanding and comprehension of texts through Vipers. This is all underpinned by a love of reading.

At Marden Primary Academy, all children have opportunities to express their interests and talents through an extended curriculum offer, which includes: music; performing and visual arts; sporting competitions and languages.

Our children deliver meaningful change by establishing their own authentic action projects which are determined by the learning journey of each unit of inquiry.

Evidenced through monitoring, observations and discussions with teachers and children, all children at Marden Primary Academy will make effective progress. Outcomes for children will be in line with national expectations. The children will have the knowledge, skills, understanding and experiences needed to articulate their thinking across a broad and balanced curriculum. As confident communicators, the children will be able to share their learning with wider audiences, including parents and the local community. Fundamentally, as a result of the curriculum implementation, all of the children will be ready for the next step in their educational journey as internationally-minded citizens.

Subject Specific curriculum statements

International Mindedness

International-mindedness is central to the IB mission and is a foundational principle to its educational philosophy; it is at the heart of the continuum of international education.

International-mindedness is a view of the world in which people see themselves connected to the global community and assume a sense of responsibility towards its members. It is an awareness of the interrelatedness of all nations and peoples, and is a recognition of the complexity of these. Internationally minded people appreciate and value the diversity of peoples, cultures and societies in the world. They make efforts to learn more about others and to develop empathy and solidarity towards them to achieve mutual understanding and respect (Oxfam 2105; UNESCO 2015).

Primary Years Programme (PYP) learners and their learning communities have a range of perspectives, values and traditions. The concept of international-mindedness builds on these diverse perspectives to generate a sense of common humanity and shared guardianship of the planet.

At Marden Primary Academy, we believe in developing internationally-minded people, who understand their role in providing a better future for humanity across the planet. We are aware of ecological challenges bestowed upon the earth due to the climate crisis and their role in rectifying these challenges. We are aware of the injustices felt across the globe by marginalised communities and are active in our quest to rid the world of these injustices.

Only with intercultural understanding can we empathise and fully respect those from communities other than our own. Learning about other cultures, religions, ethnicities, genders, sexualities and abilities is paramount to this understanding. With 7117 known languages in the world, we believe in nurturing knowledge of languages other than a native language to our children. We celebrate those with English as an additional language and we are passionate about developing our children’s understanding of Spanish too. International Mindedness is not restricted to our curriculum at Marden Primary Academy; it is threaded through every facet of school life.