Newquay Primary Academy
Curriculum Overview
At Newquay Primary Academy we foster an achievement culture which celebrates both effort and achievement in a wide range of areas. We believe that academic excellence is an important part of human excellence. We also value the development of pupils’ imaginative and creative dimensions as well as their characters. Through a broad curriculum and wide range of extra-curricular activities, our pupils discover the important balance between creative and logical thinking. These opportunities are fundamental to ensuring that each child discovers their hidden gifts, developing a sense of individuality and a confidence in their own abilities.
Our curriculum aims
Our curriculum follows the National Curriculum. It is designed around the needs of our cohort and the rigorous demands of the primary and secondary assessment frameworks. What is different about Newquay Primary Academy is our strong focus on:
- Sport and healthy/ active lifestyles
- Learning outdoors in our coastal environment
- Extra-curricular activities.
All curriculum subjects use opportunities for pupils to learn in our local, coastal environment in order to make their learning more memorable and relevant. Our Outdoor Learning Policy focuses on how our unique local environment can be used to reinforce learning e.g. Local History in Newquay studying the science of the coast.
Our curricular aims are:
- To create a culture of very high aspiration and enable every pupil to make outstanding progress regardless of their starting point.
- To support every pupil to use language and numbers effectively, ensuring that every pupil obtains an acceptable level of literacy and numeracy in order to support them to improve their social life, career prospects and social mobility in a rapidly changing world.
- To develop lively, enquiring minds, fostering in every pupil the ability to question and argue rationally and to apply themselves enthusiastically to tasks and physical skills.
- To encourage in our pupils a respect for religious and moral values and tolerance of other races, religions and ways of life.
- To help our pupils appreciate human achievements and aspirations and inspire them to set themselves aspirational goals and targets.
- To follow the National Curriculum, promoting physical and mental health with an emphasis on sport and physical activity, making use of our coastal environment.
- To ensure that 100% of our disadvantaged pupils achieve expected progress in reading, writing and mathematics.
- To achieve a KS2 value added for all subjects which is average or above for disadvantaged students and those with special needs.
Newquay Primary Academy Curriculum Overview
Cognitive Load Theory
In September 2021, Newquay Primary Academy introduced the Big Maths approach to the teaching of fluency in mathematics. In September 2024, we switched to a new and improved approach called Winning With Numbers. We made the decision to use these approaches because they significantly improved standards.
Both Winning With Numbers and Big Maths sequence, and simplify, the maths curriculum. They aligns broader curriculum statements to a detailed framework of progression.
Ben Harding, the creator of Winning With Numbers and Big Maths, embraced the challenge of creating a framework of progression for the primary maths curriculum. Ben’s research in Cognitive Load Theory and brain development (how children learn) informed the production of these carefully sequenced maths learning journeys.
Teaching staff at Newquay Primary Academy all recognise the natural logic of maths, and the need to guide children through a natural chronology of learning (every curriculum advises of the same). Winning With Numbers documents all of these natural steps, in their natural sequence, embracing the natural simplicity.
Due to the success of Winning With Numbers and Big Maths, our Newquay Primary Academy curriculum has been designed in a similar way. Our medium term plans demonstrate how children are guided through a natural chronology of learning. For more information, please see the planning section on our website.
Cognitive Load Theory has several interweaving dimensions and has arisen from many years of robust educational research. John Sweller has been described as the ‘Godfather of CLT’, and it was he and his colleagues that started carrying out the research and developing the ideas around CLT. Although this started in the 1980s, to this day CLT continues to find and use evidence about how the brain learns to inform principles for teaching.
The human brain’s Working Memory (WM) is the part that processes information in the present moment. It is very limited. It can only process a small amount of new information at one time. However, it can work much better if it is able to retrieve relevant knowledge (facts/skills/concepts) stored in the brain’s Long Term Memory (LTM). If the brain is working to process information then it is not yet a part of a fluent ‘schema’ in the LTM. This adds high demand on the working memory, which can become overloaded and fail to process the new information. In order to avoid this cognitive overload we have to build on top of existing fluency. Fluency is always built on top of fluency.
‘Cognitive Load Theory is about not overloading the working memory, and about not underloading the working memory. CLT is about getting the load right.’
How do we make new knowledge and skills ‘stick’ at Newquay Primary Academy?
Once the learner can carry out the process independently, it is the teacher’s job to re-locate
the learning into the learner’s LTM. If the LTM is not affected then nothing has been learnt. We have to make the learning stick! The outcome of this is that the knowledge is now available for future retrieval and transfer.
Making It Stick! 5 Key Ideas
- Keep doing it: Practice makes permanent!
- Come back to it: Use gradually increasing time gaps to train the brain to retrieve the new knowledge (spaced practice). Include regular ‘upkeep’ checks and low-stakes testing, especially for key learning.
- Mix it Up: Play around with this journey from WM to LTM, particularly by weaving in other learning in the gaps between practice sessions (interleaving).
- Connect: As this ‘new knowledge’ becomes ‘old knowledge’ it is then used as an ‘already fluent part’ for more new knowledge. We also connect this new knowledge to a bigger curriculum picture.
- Increase Challenge/Transference: Guide learners to use the new knowledge with greater independence and in increasingly challenging and unfamiliar problems (expertise reversal).