Intent
At Birchwood Primary School we understand that computing is a vital part of life within school and outside of it, therefore we understand how important it is to prepare our children to be able to interact and stay safe in our rapidly developing digital world.
Our Curriculum is designed to cover all aspects of the National Curriculum, which has been broken down into substantive and disciplinary knowledge. Our Curriculum ensures planned sequences of learning develop on prior knowledge and skills, building upon these to prepare pupils for the next stage in their learning journey. Computing is divided into three strands: online safety, digital literacy and computer science.
Implementation
Our computing curriculum has been designed following the National Curriculum for Computing for KS1 and KS2 and The Early Years Foundation Stage Framework.
At Birchwood, children have access to a range of equipment, ensuring that they can use ICT for a range of purposes and across different curriculum areas. Where appropriate, the teaching of these skills is linked to the termly topic being taught, other times it will be as discrete units. This ensures that computing knowledge can be frequently applied and consolidated to enable children to revisit prior knowledge before progressing through our sequenced curriculum. Staff within school receive regular training with computing specialists to further develop subject knowledge and pedagogy.
We use Project Evolve to underpin our teaching of online safety which is embedded within all computing teaching and taught discretely as well as across other curriculum areas. Every year we participate in the Online Safety day in February, to further reinforce and develop understanding in this area of learning. We recognise the importance of online safety and teach this from Early Years.
Children are taught discretely to use programs for digital literacy. They are then given a range of opportunities to apply their digital literacy within school through presenting their learning. Outside of school, children are able to continue to develop their digital literacy through Times Table Rockstars, Reading Plus and Kodable. We have chosen these in order to reinforce digital literacy skills whilst also embedding learning across other curriculum areas.
The computing curriculum is planned in a logical and systematic manner allowing children to gain the knowledge needed to program, create, debug and reason through computer based and practical activities.
Impact
Our computing curriculum is well thought out and planned to give children the skills, knowledge and opportunity to be challenged in their thinking and learning and prepare for their next stage of learning and into their future lives.
We measure the impact of our curriculum through the following methods: Pupil discussions and interviews about their learning, an assessment of standards achieved judged against the skills and knowledge outlined in our Curriculum overview (termly) and from evidence of pupils work in their folders and in our shared area.
By the time our children leave Birchwood Primary School we want them to: Understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including logic, algorithms and data representations. Be able to analyse problems in computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve problems. Be able to evaluate and apply information technology analytically to solve problems and to be responsible, competent, respectful and creative users of information and communication technology.