School Vision
Our Christian Values and Vision
Vision Statement (Child Version): With God we learn to love and love to learn.
Values and Vision Statement (Adult Version): Thurnham School is a caring Christian community where everybody is valued and encouraged to flourish within a questioning, collaborative, creative and loving environment. This is rooted in Jesus’ teaching and acceptance of all, for example in the parable of ‘The Lost Sheep’ (Matthew 18:10-14).
General Curriculum Areas
The school offers a broad, balanced and relevant curriculum according to the requirements of the Foundation Stage (for EYFS) and the National Curriculum (from Year 1 onwards). The National Curriculum core subjects are English, Mathematics and Science. The foundation subjects include Art and Design, Design Technology, Geography, History, Music and PE. RE is also a compulsory subject and Computing. All subjects will be cross-curricular and usually taught through a termly topic (for example RE stories can be used also in a group reading exercise, or in music the children may learn counting songs). There are times when some areas are taught as discrete subjects such as RE, Science topics or Mathematical concepts but generally the children will be taught through topic. We also teach PSHRE sessions as part of our curriculum.
We also incorporate enrichment days or weeks to drive the enjoyment and engagement of our curriculum. These include Global Citizenship , Maths week, Writing/Reading week, Superheroes Day, Safer Internet Day, Brain Day, Design Technology Day or British Values and of course other days relating to the curriculum which can all involve bringing relevant things in from home or dressing up.
We also try to ensure the children understand and know their local community:
EYFS visit and join the Library
Year 1 visit the Green
Year 2 visit the Woodland Trust and learn about the Church with a detailed visit.
All the children walk to Holy Cross once a year for a whole school service.
The children also enjoy various trips further away as well to enhance their learning in a topic.
As a whole staff we reflected on three ‘superpowers’ that we felt would be most beneficial to our children and should run through all of our curriculum;
- Resilience
- Independence
- Brain Power (thinking about thinking)
and Creativity which underpins all three
We continue to review our curriculum to further clarify our intent and methods of implementation of our curriculum. We want an outstanding curriculum to develop out of that review with our three superpowers at its heart - being creative in all we do.