Computing Curriculum Intent

The child is at the very centre of everything we do at Great Wilbraham. Our computing curriculum is built on strong, pedagogical principles, with every single child encouraged and nurtured to meet and achieve their potential. We make it our aim to discover what children are good at and to use this to promote a positive attitude to our computing learning.

We recognise that we live in a digital society and have designed a computing curriculum that aims to provide children with opportunities to locate, investigate, analyse, share and present digital information with increasing confidence.

We provide our pupils with the skills they need to consider and use this information in an efficient manner. We endeavour to provide a robust computing curriculum that engages and inspires all learners as we recognise that education plays a vital role in ensuring our next generation is able to make the right choices when they are using technology.

We want our pupils to evolve into creative computer scientists. At Great Wilbraham, our curriculum provides regular opportunities for everyone to develop, share and apply their technical knowledge in innovative ways. We hope to engage the potentially disengaged through the use of technology as well as using it to appeal to underachieving learners. By giving our pupils more choice about how they use technology, we aim to inspire each and every learner, whether they are logical thinkers or creative learners.

Across both Key Stage One and Key Stage Two, we embed Computing across the whole curriculum to ensure learning is purposeful, engaging and accessible. We prepare our pupils for high school by ensuring they are digitally literate by the time they finish Key Stage Two. By exposing our pupils to a range of technical tools and technology, we hope that they leave primary school with a solid foundation to grow into active participants in our digital world. We use the NCCE Computing scheme of work to cover the three areas of the Computing National Curriculum: Digital literacy, Computer Science and Information Technology.

Computing Curriculum Implementation

At Great Wilbraham computing is taught in units throughout the year which ensures we provide a progressive and comprehensive scheme of work in line with the National Curriculum.

Each child has access to a Chromebook and there is also a bank of laptops. Each class has an iPad and there is a collection of tablets within the school.

We use Google Classroom within our lessons and to provide homework to our pupils, all children have their own individualised Google Classroom accounts.

All classrooms benefit from a visualiser and an interactive panel, which is used to display explanatory presentations provided within the Teach Computing scheme. Pupils’ work is saved in a variety of locations, but principally on the school server and within Google Classroom.

Assessment in computing involves the following teacher activity:

• Provide opportunities for the children to review and revisit their understanding
• Use the NCCE ‘I can’ statements to inform their teacher judgements and track individual’s progress (using Insight)
• Children will be recorded either as: working below, working at, or working above age-related expectations.
• Use this information to review and adapt the teaching and learning accordingly

Teaching staff are provided with opportunities to develop their subject expertise through access to training, most recently provided by STEM Learning staff. Whilst computing is taught discretely, the use of technology is encouraged to support learning across all curriculum areas.

Computing Curriculum Impact

The success of our Computing curriculum is assessed by both teachers and the Computing Lead in order to inform future adaptations of the schemes of work and help to ensure that progression is evident throughout school.

The Computing lead will:

• Conduct ‘pupil perception’ sessions, ensuring children are actively contributing to our curriculum content.
• Ensure pupils, parents and staff are consistently and regularly consulted about the curriculum and the impact it makes.
• Carry out staff audits to monitor staff confidence and satisfaction with our Computing curriculum
• Monitor work on digital platforms and within the children’s STEM Learning book against each year groups’ long-term plan.
• Review annual progress data.

 We aim that our pupils should:

• Be enthusiastic and confident in their approach towards Computing.
• Present as competent and adaptable ‘Computational Thinkers’ who are able to use identified concepts and approaches in all of their learning.
• Be able to identify the source of problems and work with perseverance to ‘debug’ them.
• Create and evaluate their own project work.
• Have a secure understanding of the positive applications and specific risks (and benefits) associated with a broad range of digital technology.
• Transition to secondary school with a keen interest in the continued learning of this subject.

The desired outcomes of the curriculum will ensure that pupils are well-rounded students, ready to embark on their high school education. Pupils will have an understanding of what they are good at and will have developed the appropriate skills to face their future challenges.