Our Learning
Curriculum K: Preparing our children for life in the 21st century
Curriculum K is based on extensive research. It is tailored to support the specific opportunities and challenges our children and community face now and in the future.
Curriculum K is both what we teach and how we teach.
What we teach is organised into four strands:
- Academic: Children who have the key skills and knowledge to be successful
- Reading: Our children will be committed readers who understand reading’s centrality in their education and lives. Many are passionate and love nothing more than settling down with a good book.
- Writing: Creative and correct. Our children are excited and imaginative; they have the basic skills – spelling, handwriting, grammar – to back this up.
- Maths: Everyone understands key concepts and are secure in these. Many are enthused mathematicians who love applying their knowledge to solve problems.
- Science: Kensington children cannot wait for their next science lesson. They are curious and full of awe and wonder.
- Technology: Central to our curriculum and our lives, the latest technologies inspire and enthuse our children.
- Communication: Whatever the future holds, communication will continue to be core to our success as a human race. Kensington’s children are confident communicators. This is true verbally in a variety of situations and to a variety of audiences but also through art and music.
- Health: ‘Apart from education, you need good health’, Kapil Dev.
- Physical health: Our children are full of life, fit and ready to go. This helps them focus and persevere. They are also building the foundations for a long, healthy, happy life.
- Emotional health: We all face difficulties in life. Kensington’s children have the capacity and the skills to overcome life’s speed bumps. They are resilient, self-aware, thoughtful, tolerant and kind.
- Culture: Passing on the best that has been thought and said. At the heart of humanities success has been the ability to pass knowledge on from generation to generation. Our children have a wide-ranging knowledge, appreciation, and often love of history, art, music, religion, design, technology, geography, and the breadth and depth of information and experience that surrounds them.
How we teach is based on the most up-to-date and comprehensive meta-research into cognition and memory. We have woven seven strategies – our 7K – into the curriculum. These support acquisition, deepening, and securing of knowledge and skills. Alongside this, Kensington’s children develop a growth mindset and self-regulation strategies to ensure that learning is maximised and key concepts are transferred from working memory to long-term memory; because if nothing has altered in long-term memory, nothing has been learned.
Through the delivery of Curriculum K we aim to provide our children with the essentials skills and knowledge they need to support them to make the best possible transition into secondary school. The set of skills and knowledge we believe to be most important is devised from the National Curriculum, established relationships with our main secondary schools and our own research into learning. From our identified set of essential skills and knowledge, expectations for each term and each academic year are set. Regular assessments against these expectations enables our staff to identify any areas of further support and inform future teaching and planning.
Catch-up funding
As part of the Government's support for schools, we have received £80 per pupil to support our efforts in closing the gaps that were caused in 4 months of missed school. As part of this, we are required to publish a plan. This was agreed by our Local Advisory Board on 14th October 2020 and can be downloaded below.
