Intent
Science at Westfield school enables and encourages children to question, explore and discover the world around them through practical, hands-on, skills-based enquiry. We use the Cornerstones curriculum tool to deliver ambitious and engaging learning, which covers all of the Science programmes of study in the National Curriculum . This ensures our children retain core knowledge and skills that are expertly sequenced to be built upon year-to-year, giving our children a solid scientific foundation and curiosity to pursue throughout their life-long learning journey. Across all key stages, we teach children what it means to be a young scientist: hypothesising and accurately recording observations; drawing conclusions when completing experiments and creating their own scientific enquiries; and applying Science to become scientifically competent, active citizens in an increasingly scientific and technological world.
For more details on what each Key Stage covers, please see the Cornerstones overview for Science. Please see our overview breakdown for each year group to see how the topics are sequenced throughout the year.
Implementation
In the classroom
- Regular science lessons equivalent to a minimum of 45 minutes a week taught throughout the school.
- Regular experiments and practical lessons to engage and excite children.
- Scientific vocabulary explicitly taught, discussed and displayed for repeated reference.
- Children have an opportunity to use Maths, English and Computing skills within science lessons.
- High expectation of accurate presentation.
- Time given for pupils to purple pen (edit) misconceptions and misspelling of key vocabulary taught.
- Classes have a science display (‘wonder wall’) or ‘wonder workstation’ element that is added to throughout the course of a unit learning.
Across the whole school
- Science displays with vocabulary, science news and photos in the corridor to highlight the importance of the subject and its relevance to pupils’ lives.
- Science week is organised to inspire children to make links across their scientific learning and create memorable experiences.
- Individual class and whole school Science trips.
- Science Club – to inspire children from all year groups and develop scientific understanding for those particularly interested in the sciences.
Monitoring and training
- Book looks are completed every 2nd term to check coverage and progression across the school.
- Science week training – showing staff the expectation for work completed and highlighting cross-curricular links.
- Meetings with our school improvement advisor.
- Our Science Lead accesses training each year to improve identified areas of the subject. In 2022/2023, the focus is to look at how we can extend our pupils’ learning through challenge in Science.
Impact
Assessing the impact of our intent and implementation on our children’s learning is key for our teachers delivering and our pupils accessing the most ambitious Science curriculum possible. We have a variety of different ways that we do this, in order to make sure we identify gaps in our children’s knowledge and skills; make sure they are challenged enough; support those with additional needs; and to teach our pupils how to be independent, scientific thinkers and practitioners. The progress children make through the impact of the implementation of our intent is measured through a variety of different ways:
- Low stakes testing at the end of a unit.
- Pupil voice.
- Assessment for learning during lessons..
- Use of ‘Knowing more, remembering more’ questions at the start of every lesson, to recap the key knowledge and skills worked on in the previous lesson.
- Monitoring (see above).
- Whole school data collection 3 times a year.
- Bi-termly data and outcome report discussed with Head of School.
