Our Curriculum Design
At Cwmlai we strive for excellent teaching and learning with pupil well-being at its heart. We have worked hard as a whole school community to design a new curriculum which is innovative, exciting, engaging and above all relevant to our pupils’ lives with purposeful activities in authentic contexts.
Our curriculum design has evolved over the past two years through a range of engagement and professional activities including discussions with our pupils, staff, parents, governors and local schools. Each of these has helped to inform decisions regarding the design of our curriculum and has included:
Our curriculum is designed to allow all learners to realise the characteristics set out in the Four Purposes (ambitious, capable learners; enterprising, creative contributors; ethical, informed citizens; and healthy, confident individuals) and provides for appropriate progression. Our school curriculum is broad and balanced and includes learning opportunities within and across all of the Areas of learning and experience: Expressive Arts; Health and Wellbeing; Humanities; Language, Literacy and Communication; Mathematics and Numeracy; and Science and Technology. It encompasses the concepts in all of the statements of what matters and aligns with the mandatory requirements of teaching Welsh, English and Religion, Values and Ethics (RVE).
The mandatory elements of Relationship and Sexuality Education (RSE) and the cross-curricular skills of literacy, numeracy and digital competence are embedded throughout the curriculum.
Ensuring that our children make progress, regardless of a learner’s stage of development or starting point, is at the heart of all our curriculum design. Our principles of progression are:
Our school improvement planning and review cycle will continue to focus on ensuring that our curriculum will continue to meet the needs of our learners, ensure our pupils make progress and are in line with our overall school vision. We will continue to seek and employ feedback from pupils, staff, parents, Governors, cluster schools and evidence-based research to amend and refine our curriculum design.