Intent, Implementation and Impact
Quality of Education: Intent
We aim for excellence in teaching and learning across all curriculum subjects, improving the life chances for our children. Our children will leave Woodlea as confident learners who can clearly articulate the extensive knowledge, thoughts and experiences gained at our school. They will talk passionately about the ‘awe and wonder’ of the world we live in and have the learning behaviours needed for a successful transition to the next phase of their schooling and beyond.
Subject leaders worked together in 2024 to create a new curriculum that is highly ambitious for all children, with inspirational core texts and reading at the heart of each term’s learning, opportunities for outdoor learning in our unique woodland setting and the cultural capital they need to succeed and enjoy life. Our curriculum is carefully sequenced to be progressive and spirals from Reception to Year 6, enabling children to build on, apply and make links in their knowledge and skills over time. Our deep understanding of our children’s needs and life experiences informed our curriculum design to ensure that it addresses identified gaps in these. This is enhanced by the adaptation of high-quality schemes for some subjects, carefully chosen to complement our curriculum and facilitate the best possible outcomes for our children. We have fidelity to Read Write Inc for Phonics and in Years 1-6 we also use adapted versions of: The Literacy Tree for English; White Rose for maths; Developing Experts for science; Kapow for history, geography, art, DT and computing; Language Angels for French; Charanga for Music; SCARF for PSHE and RSE and the PE Hub for Physical Education. We follow the Hampshire Agreed Syllabus for RE and expand this with resources from Kapow. Our curriculum is accompanied with detailed skills, knowledge and vocabulary progression documents for every subject.
Quality of Education: Implementation
There is a strong drive across the school to improve reading standards and levels of enjoyment. All teaching and support staff from YR to Y6 have received extensive training in Read Write Inc and the Early Reading Lead coaches and advises staff each week to ensure fidelity to the scheme. Books for children receiving phonics teaching are matched to the phonics knowledge they are taught each week. They take home a book that has been used in the lessons, to improve fluency, and either a fiction or non-fiction book with matched sounds. Lesson matched RWI videos are also sent home weekly. Children in KS2 who are unable to read fluently receive Fresh Start Tutoring each week, with their books being age appropriate as well as matched to their phonics teaching. All staff teach the phonics curriculum effectively. The Early Reading Leader regularly checks the progress pupils make and adjusts groupings and intervention accordingly.
Our passion to develop reading for pleasure across the school has been enhanced by a brand-new library with 2000 new high-quality texts in September 2024. These include genres and authors suggested by children.
We use a progressive Guided Reading teaching method in KS2, which focuses heavily on improving vocabulary, fluency and comprehension, in a structure followed these classes over the course of every week. Every class has ‘Reading for Pleasure’ timetabled into their day and every child experiences being engrossed in a high-quality fiction/non-fiction by being read to at the end of every day.
A rigorous monitoring programme by senior leaders and external partners, as well as regular CPD, ensures that staff have excellent subject knowledge and skills in quality first teaching. This includes making use of up-to-date educational research and learning from best practice in other schools. Leaders provide additional support for those members of staff who are new to the school, subject leader area or year group. Staff attend half-termly collaborative planning sessions online with other schools who are using core texts selected from The Literacy Tree, focusing on progression of skill development, modelling and looking at excellent examples of final outcomes.
Changes to planning templates have supported staff to think deeply about learning intentions, success criteria, mini-plenaries, questioning, use of support staff and chunking of learning, to avoid cognitive overload. Learning walks are checking that this has been embedded in staff practice and that information is always presented to children in a clear and coherent manner. CPD and coaching has focused on modelling, learning intentions, success criteria and child self-assessment, assessing learning within a lesson and using this to make instant adaptations, or to inform and adapt the progression of future learning and interventions. This includes making more effective use of the skills of our Learning Support Assistants. In 2024 staff received training and coaching from Hampshire Advisors in effective modelling and questioning, guided reading structure and task variation/faded scaffolding in maths. All staff follow the new Teaching and Learning/ Feedback and Marking policies to ensure high standards of feedback and high expectations of presentation in books. As a result, teachers present their lessons more clearly and are able to check understanding more accurately.Teachers and Learning Support Assistants are highly aware of the importance of modelling a high standard of spoken and written English. Children are encouraged to speak in full sentences and grammatical errors are sensitively rephrased by staff. Woodlea will begin the Voice21 project this year, with two KS1 and KS2 staff members assigned to drive this.
Classroom environments have been improved across the school to be child focused. They have been re-designed to provide calmer and more organised learning spaces, with learning walls that develop progressively and reflect current learning. Children are taught to use these to become more independent.
Pre and post assessments determine individual starting points. Regular, low-stake assessments check whether skills and knowledge has been embedded in long term memory, across the curriculum. A robust moderation programme and an online assessment system is used by staff every term, which is the focus of pupil progress meetings, which happen half-termly.
The skills of all members of staff are used effectively to ensure that children with specific behavioural or learning needs are able to access the full curriculum, with increasing independence. Part of our HLTA’s weekly timetable is dedicated to providing support for children in receipt of Pupil Premium, SEND or EAL, or to release teachers to work with these children. Staff have also received CPD by Hampshire advisors on supporting children with English as and Additional Language. Leaders provide staff with clear strategies to support pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND). Timetabling of Learning Support Assistants ensures that children who struggle receive support to facilitate rapid improvement.
Quality of Education: ImpactPlease see our school data page.
For our individual subject intent statements, please click on the links below:
Art curriculum intent statement
DT curriculum intent statement
English curriculum intent statement
French curriculum intent statement
Geography curriculum intent statement
History curriculum intent statement
Maths curriculum intent statement
Music curriculum intent statement
PE curriculum intent statement
PSHE curriculum intent statement