Teaching & Learning

We aim to raise the attainment of children across all areas of learning and take great care and effort in ensuring that your child experiences interesting, relevant and engaging learning opportunities. Our constantly evolving curriculum is broad, balanced and relevant to the children. We monitor their progress throughout the year and this enables us to ensure that we are providing the appropriate challenge for them.

We are extremely fortunate to have a talented and committed group of staff at The Orchards. Our recruitment and retention of high quality teachers is a particular feature of the school as is the development of teachers into members of our innovative leadership team.

Teachers at The Orchards show knowledge and understanding of the subjects they teach based upon a process of co-planning, targeted professional development and commitment to improvement.  Part of our development, we have focused on inspirational starts to lessons, clarity of explanation and realistic but high challenges in recent professional learning development activities.
Teachers set fair and well understood behaviour expectations, employing self regulation and collaboration. A clear and coherent policy is adhered to consistently by both adults and children. Inappropriate behaviour is always addressed and positive behaviour is always remunerated with a systematic process of rewards leading to our prestigious ‘Gold Badge’. .
Curriculum planning is extensive and reviewed / updated on a frequent basis informed by evaluation. Learning intentions are explicit and activities planned to fulfil these intentions. Lesson plans have a coherent structure that includes introductory activities, main activities and summary with explicit resource requirements. We have continued to develop the differentiation and assessment in the planning in order to meet the needs of all individual learners and ensure that all have equal access to the full range of curriculum subjects. Each class has a dedicated timetable that gives them regular, planned access to a variety of specialist rooms including PE, Games, Music, Art & Design, ICT and Cookery. The provision of specialist teaching presents further opportunities to the children and is used as PPA cover for staff. The use of other adults is also significant.
The curriculum framework is a three dimensional model which integrates the children’s requirements within
1. The Year group
2. The particular subject or area of learning and
3. The whole school learning ethos.
Learning opportunities at the school are planned and delivered to generate interest, encourage and engage children. Planned objectives challenge the children and sensitivity is shown to pupil’s individual circumstances. A range of strategies are used to enable all children to learn effectively.
Click below to view curriculm letters (pdf format)
       
 Change the School Improvement Plan (SIP) priorities to  •  Improve the quality of teaching and learning:
(1) Achieve 85% good or better in lesson observations
(2) Ensure all staff have at least one good or better lesson observation
  • Teaching is inspirational, imaginative and engaging for all learners
  • Expectations are high and this is made explicit to all learners, which secures very good levels of progress
  • Teaching and learning meets the individual needs of all learners