Harris Academies
All Academies in our Federation aim to transform the lives of the students they serve by bringing about rapid improvement in examination results, personal development and aspiration.

Central Office

Bexley

Bromley

Clapham

Croydon

Greenwich

Haringey

Havering

Merton

Newham

Southwark

Stratford

Sutton

Thurrock

Wandsworth

Westminster

Willesden

Curriculum Intent

Harris Primary Academy – Equality Curriculum Intent

Harris Primary Academy Benson welcomes all children and values them as individuals, treating them equally and with respect. We believe that all children have the right to have their own needs incorporated into their curriculum in order to achieve success through the following approaches;

  • Provide an accessible environment, which is secure and safe, so that all our children can flourish.

  • We believe that all teachers are teachers of children with special educational needs and it is therefore a whole school responsibility to ensure that these children’s needs are addressed.

  • Through staff working together as a team, and in partnership with pupils and their parents and carers, we strive to ensure that our aims are met.

  • Ensure all staff are aware of anti-discriminatory practice, promoting and valuing equality and diversity.

  • Promote early identification of children with additional needs to ensure interventions are in place to address their needs.

  • Monitor the progress of all our children to ensure they are meeting their full potential.

  • Work with all external agencies and organisations

  • To build relationships with other schools within our community including specialist and out-with Harris Federation.

  • We ensure that our curriculum is fully inclusive and will not discriminate against the protected characteristics: age, disability, gender, gender identity, race, religion or belief and sexual orientation.  

  • Our inclusive teaching approach ensures that all children can access the learning using resources and strategies that they may need, including modified language, additional support or resource.

  • Follow the guidance in the SEN Code of Practice, Equalities Act 2010 and The Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014

 

Intent Statement
What do we want for children at HPAB?

 

We have an ambitious curriculum, which aims to equip pupils with the knowledge and skills that will: 

  • Enable pupils to build strong foundations of knowledge upon which they can firmly anchor new knowledge and make connections throughout the rest of the lives 
  • Prepare pupils to be highly successful in an academic and aspirational secondary education  
  • Encourage and maintain our pupils’ curiosity by making learning purposeful
  • Encourage pupils to lead happy and healthy lives throughout childhood and into adulthood  
  • Ensure that all pupils’ leave HPAB being able to read and have a love reading
  • Inspire children to be inquisitive and believe that they can achieve anything they put their mind to
  • Create learners that have a love for learning and develop core values through our Community Champions programme


To have a strong sense of belonging
As we are a one-form entry primary school, this allows us to foster a real sense of community and enables every single member of our school community to have a sense of belonging whether you are a child, a parent or a staff member. We cherish the unity of belonging to our Benson family whilst also celebrating the diversity that our family is made up of. Our small setting means that we can operate as a ‘family’ and as all adults in school know the children extremely well, it means that we can adapt our provision to meet their specific needs. Working closely with other local schools means our children can also feel part of the wider Harris family but most of all we want our children to be happy and our string sense of community creates that.

To be confident
At its heart, our curriculum aims to foster and develop children who are confident to start the next stages of their educational journey. Confident in themselves as individuals, and in their abilities as resilient learners. Interested in the world around them, and able to question the things that they see. Well-rounded, in that they have been exposed and introduced to a curriculum that has breadth and depth and can make links and connections with the world around them. Ultimately children come to school to learn and therefore we keep the decisions about what we teach, when we teach it and why we teach it at the heart of everything that we do. For us at Benson this starts with reading as it unlocks the rest of the curriculum for all of our children. We know that reading is a key life skill, so every morning begins with a phonics or reading session.  From the first day here at Benson, we are building the foundations for you not only to learn to read but to love to read throughout school and beyond.

To be aspirational and driven
We want our children to be enthusiastic learners with a real love for learning. Our curriculum inspires children to be inquisitive, curious and open their eyes to some of the cultural, and academic legacies of our local area, and the global community. Our curriculum must allow children to compete and achieve at the highest level and achieve equality of opportunities. Because of this, our curriculum places an unapologetic emphasis on the importance of ensuring that our children are confidently literate and numerate, as these skills underpin all learning. We want all of our children to be aspirational and driven to believe in themselves so that they can achieve anything they put their mind to. The children at Benson are given the chance to lead through the school council and also the environment squad that takes responsibility for our school environment and beyond.  

To be kind and collaborative
If children leave Benson at the end of the primary schooling as kind, considerate and empathetic individuals then our curriculum has done a good job.  Spiritual, moral and cultural education is taught explicitly throughout our RE and PSHE curriculum but also implicitly in the way that staff model positive relationships, patience, kindness and conflict management. The children are immersed in a number of opportunities to show kind and collaborative behaviours from caring for our environment, donating to the local food bank, raising money for a number of charities and in discussing ways to improve the school through our school council.  This is also emphasised in our behaviour system that praises positive choices and encourages restorative conversations. 

To be independent
We foster, in all of our children an intrinsic love of learning which is developed through a range of techniques – open ended tasks, peer mentoring, classrooms set up to encourage independence, problem solving, outdoor adventurous activity days and enrichment activities both in and out of school. We want our children to be independent thinkers which we is encouraged through our class assemblies, class debates and PSHE lessons. We want our children to have a strong moral grounding which is taught through our school morals of always showing respect, taking responsibility and making the right choices. There is a focus on enriching and using vocabulary accurately in all subjects which enables a better understanding of concepts, ideas and supports the children in being able to articulate clearly what they have they learnt in each subject. We do this by expanding their cultural capital and the breadth of their vocabulary.

To embrace failure
At Benson we teach a mastery curriculum which means that the children are constantly working to develop their knowledge, skills and understanding rather than achieving certain criteria. We have a shared acknowledgment that being able to fail is vital to children’s success later in life. Having an underdtanidng that failure is a learning process enables our children to take ownership if their learning and emabrace failure with a growth mindset. Our curriculum shares with our children, content and opportunities that take them beyond their daily immediate surroundings and offers them experiences across a wealth of different subjects, developing talents and igniting their own individual interests. We want all of our children to be resilient so that they are prepared for the every changing world we live in and have the self belief that they can achieve anything.