About our Curriculum

Intent

At Royal Cross, our pupils follow the National Curriculum. This is taught focussing on specific subjects delivered creatively.  Our curriculum boosts enjoyment and achievement as well as preparing our pupils for the KS3 curriculum.  Each subject has been planned and adapted to the needs of our deaf children and includes relevant subject specific research to support their learning.  There is an emphasis on language development and the acquisition of essential skills.  Children are encouraged to retrieve previous learning to embed and develop their understanding further.

Personal, social, and emotional development is given a high profile within school so that our children can develop confidence in their own deaf identity, gain good self-esteem and a positive view of themselves.  As a school, we want our children to understand that their identity is personal to them and it’s important that they respect and understand their own needs and wants as a deaf individual.  To improve pupils' spiritual, moral, social and cultural development our curriculum promotes basic British values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths and beliefs. At a suitable level, this helps the children to understand the importance of respect so that when they leave school they are fully prepared for life in modern Britain. It is also essential to learn protective behaviours for personal safety both online and 'out and about'.

We value both BSL and English as a language and a total communication approach is used so all children access our high-quality curriculum.  All children participate in English and BSL lessons to help them become lifelong, independent learners in an everchanging society. 

Through careful and flexible planning, Qualified Teachers of the Deaf meet the needs of individual pupils and address gaps in knowledge and understanding. Individual, personalised learning programmes are designed for specific pupils with complex needs using an adapted curriculum to develop language, communication, thinking, self-awareness, knowledge of the world, play, social and creative skills.  Staff have high expectations of pupils’ achievements and plan lessons making sure all pupils make progress and can celebrate their own learning. 

Implementation

Royal cross provides a curriculum that is planned and delivered in a personalised and differentiated approach.  We recognise that children learn in different ways, so we provide visual, kinaesthetic and auditory (where appropriate) resources. 

Pupils are taught by Qualified Teachers of the Deaf in small class groups supported by specialist Teaching Assistants. The high level of staffing allows for individual and small group work as needed and the pace and style of teaching is modified to ensure all children can access lessons and make good progress.  Pupils also have the opportunity to be taught with mainstream peers from local schools both on and off site with support from Royal Cross. All staff have specialist qualifications ensuring an excellent quality of support for children’s individual learning needs.

Our pupils receive daily phonics sessions using Red Rose Letters & Sounds alongside visual phonics.  Visual phonics is used to support pupils’ phonological awareness to develop reading, writing, and spelling skills,  and make links between lip-patterns/sounds (phonemes) and letter names/spellings (graphemes). We use a wide range of reading schemes so our children can experience a wide range of texts targeted to their individual needs.

In Maths, we follow Red Rose Maths scheme which covers concrete, pictorial and abstract learning. Children begin their journey be accessing Number land which provides our children with a nurturing, solid foundation for them to learn about numbers.  It translates crucial number knowledge into the world of children and puts it into a context that matters to them.  We want our children to be explorers, problem solvers and thinkers.  As a school, we provide children with problem solving tasks on a weekly basis.  Our children are encouraged to think about and discuss how to solve mathematical problems. This provides opportunities to discuss key vocabulary previously learnt and to develop retrieval skills.

PSHE/RHE is an important area of our curriculum and helps prepare our children for future independence, citizenship, healthy lifestyles, and personal safety.  This includes an adapted PSHE curriculum that includes relevant research linked specifically to deaf children.  PSHE runs throughout our school daily through PSHE lessons and activities, forest school, enrichment activities, deaf studies, BSL lessons and focused assembly time linked to our school values.

Deaf pupils need access to wider experiences to consolidate their learning and provide purposeful learning.  As a school, we provide a wide range of educational visits and a variety of sporting events, including attending competitions with other local schools.

Impact

Pupils at Royal Cross make excellent progress. As a team, we constantly assess our pupils learning and progress.  We use a range of assessment tools to monitor whether our curriculum is having an impact on teaching and learning.  All teachers follow clearly adapted long term plans and medium-term plans for each subject. Alongside this, teachers refer to the ‘Lancashire Assessment Materials for Assessment’ to monitor and challenge our pupils further.

Teachers are highly skilled and able to adapt to the needs of each individual pupil.  As a school, we use B Squared to collate assessment data. This is collected 3 times a year and then used to provide pupil progress meetings to discuss pupils’ achievements and identify any barriers to learning that may need extra intervention.

School council meet regularly and discuss how to improve the school and whether the curriculum is engaging and inspiring!  All pupil feedback is shared and discussed in pastoral meetings with the pastoral team.

Baseline assessments are used when pupils start in reception or when they are admitted to school. This measures pupils’ knowledge, understanding and skills.

Curriculum Policies 

Click here to view all of the curriculum policies.