Why do we teach what we teach? (Our Intent)

Cantrell Primary and Nursery School's Computing Curriculum is broad and ambitious. It is designed to give all our pupils, particularly those that are disadvantaged and pupils with SEND, the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life. Our aim is to develop children with the computational thinking and problem-solving skills they will need to succeed in, and contribute to our rapidly changing world.

How we teach it (Our Implementation)

Cantrell Primary and Nursery School's Computing Curriculum is designed in a way that allows pupils to transfer key knowledge to long-term memory; it is sequenced so that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before and towards defined end points. 

We follow the National Centre for Computing Education

It helps pupils to understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation. The tasks provided are set to build on prior knowledge from the previous year, develop the use of subject-specific vocabulary, make links to the wider life of the school environment and challenge pupils in their computing knowledge.  We recognise that all classes have children with widely differing computing abilities. This is especially true when some children have access to computing equipment at home, while others do not. We provide suitable learning opportunities for all children by matching the challenge of the task to the ability and experience of the child. We achieve this by:

• Setting common tasks which are open-ended and can have a variety of responses;
• Setting tasks of increasing difficulty (not all children complete all tasks);
• Grouping children by ability and setting different tasks for each ability group;
• Providing resources of different complexity that match the ability of the child.

What is the difference that this makes (Our Impact)

Our mission is to offer a modern, ambitious and relevant computing education which prepares our children to be ‘thinkers of the future’ who can use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change our world. Our computing curriculum has computer science at its core, teaching the principles of information and computing, digital systems and how this can then be applied through programming.

We want children to be digitally literate and have the knowledge and skills to confidently and creatively express themselves, develop ideas, show resilience and critical thinking to solve problems as active participants in the rapidly changing digital world. We intend that our curriculum prepares pupils to live in an increasingly digital society, build their cultural capital to have the ability to apply their knowledge throughout their future lives and careers.

We measure the impact of our curriculum through pupil discussions and interviewing the pupils about their learning through pupil voice, monitoring with our subject computing lead and through completed lessons. 

We use Purple Mash as platform to support our learning both in computing and across other areas of the curriculum.