Curriculum

To view our curriculum policy, please visit our policies page.

New Barn School delivers an ambitious curriculum that supports pupils with high functioning autism to thrive in education.  We work together as a school community, involving parents and families in how we best support our pupils to make sense of the school environment and help them navigate through their unique educational journey.  Our curriculum has a clear rationale that is shaped by shared values that all pupils have a right to experience education in safe and caring environment.  It takes into account pupils’ Education, Health and Care plans (EHCPs) and places their social, emotional and personal development alongside their academic potential as a key priority.  We believe passionately that with the right support, an environment that nurtures pupils’ confidence and self-esteem and has high expectations of learning, our pupils will succeed in education.

We follow the National Curriculum (2014) as a framework to deliver high quality, interesting and stimulating lessons that impart the knowledge pupils need to become educated citizens.  Our curriculum is further adapted, differentiated and extended to meet the special educational needs (SEN) of our pupils and to foster an appreciation for human creativity and achievement.  We do this by tracking pupils’ EHCP outcomes throughout the curriculum and having high expectations of learning.  Teachers are encouraged to use the national curriculum as a guideline for designing exciting lessons that develop pupils’ love of learning, create a sense of awe and wonder and meets the need of pupils with high-functioning autism.

Our curriculum is organised in a logical sequence of learning allowing pupils to build on prior learning, for teachers to continuously check understanding that allow pupils make links between topics resulting in embedding new knowledge in their long term memory.  Each curriculum area allocates time for topics to be revisited across key stages to reinforce and build upon key learning concepts to enhance understanding and address misconceptions.

We have designed our curriculum to be fully inclusive, allowing our pupils access to a broad and balanced range of subjects, enriched by learning activities that nurture personal develop and pupil character.  We actively promote pupils’ spiritual, moral, social and cultural development by providing experiences that stretch beyond the classroom walls in which pupils’ interests and talents are nurtured, through planned units of work within the PSHE curriculum and through assemblies.

The impact of our curriculum aims to provide pupils at New Barn School with the strategies in which they can become lifelong learners, who are well prepared for adulthood and able to actively participate in society.