curriculum

The Underhill curriculum has been carefully designed to ensure all children achieve and succeed in all subjects. Our 'Be' words are woven throughout the curriculum to enable all children to embody our values.

Our curriculum:

• creates lifelong readers
• increases and improves oracy skills
• builds on the children's physical and mental fitness
• broadens the children's understanding of the world and develops their cultural capital (Be Curious)
• sparks their curiosity and imagination (Be Curious)
• teaches the children how to work collaboratively and inclusively (Be Cooperative)
• prepares them for life after Underhill (Be Confident).

Our curriculum has been designed to create a balance between the National Curriculum requirements and a range of opportunities which broadens our children's life experiences. It provides experiences and opportunities which best meet the children's learning and developmental needs. 

Each curriculum area is led by a member of our teaching team to ensure a clear progression of skills and knowledge from Nursery to Year 6. Subject leaders ensure that the medium term planning identifies curriculum links between year groups and subjects in order to develop depth to the learning. 

Through clear strategic planning, our curriculum provides not only memorable experiences but is rich in opportunities from which the children can learn and develop transferable skills. The acquisition of knowledge and the development of skills is carefully planned to create a purposeful and exciting learning journey for every child, ensuring that milestones are met at key stages throughout their primary education. Teachers plan and tailor units of work and lessons to address the specific individual needs of pupils so that all children are able to reach their full potential regardless of their starting point.  

Alongside 'I can, you can, we can' we use the 'Learning Pit', first developed by James Nottingham in 2007, to ensure that the curriculum delivery is underpinned with a positivity that encourages all children to have a go. The Learning Pit is a tool that children are introduced to, to helps them to visualise the process of managing new learning and challenge. When a child is posed with a question or concept that they perceive as ‘hard’ we support them to tackle this in a positive way. We celebrate being in the learning pit with the children as we know it is part of the learning process. 

 Pupils leave Underhill with a secure understanding of the academic content; with the understanding of how to be socially, morally, spiritually and culturally responsible and aware; how to make positive contributions to the local community and how to endeavour to be the best that they can be. We aim for all of our children to leave Underhill caring, confident, curious and cooperative. 

The early years foundation stage (EYFS) sets standards for the learning development and care of children from birth to 5 years old. Early years learning concentrates on 7 areas split between prime and specific areas of learning. 

The prime areas of learning are:

• communications and language
• physical development
• personal, social and emotional development.

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The specific areas of learning are:

• literacy
• mathematics
• understanding the world
• expressive arts and design

To find out more information on the National Curriculum please visit https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculum