Going Deeper – A Parents’ Guide

Intent

At Ling Moor Academy we believe that all pupils have a right to experience the core learning within their year group.  This enables them to develop a greater depth of understanding of the age appropriate content and learning. 

Our aim is to build the strong foundations, which allow the pupils to be successful in the long term – going beyond their time at Ling Moor Primary Academy.  To do this we believe all pupils need a sound and deep understanding of the age related content, as opposed to being rushed through the curriculum with short term success, but with only a fragile understanding of the structure of the learning, as this fragility has been shown to lead to misconceptions and difficulties in future learning.

We recognise that within a lesson there may be a few pupils who are ‘higher attaining’ within a particular concept.  These pupils will be challenged within lessons (once they have worked through the core learning) but will not be pushed onto content beyond their year group.

Implementation

Across the curriculum, new concepts are taught to the class as a whole, to facilitate: a deep understanding; a sense of potential and belief and the opportunity for deep whole class discussions.

All pupils with follow the same pathway through a lesson where they will be presented with ‘CORE’ learning which they are to tackle. This may have different titles in different subjects and year groups, but will often be in the form of practice tasks before moving onto form of application and reasoning.

Within a lesson the higher attainers (not pre-judged before the lesson), will have the opportunity to ‘Go Deeper’ with their learning and teachers will ensure an extra task, question or resource is available should any pupils require it.

We also recognise that a deeper knowledge will be built into the core learning which all pupils receive, perhaps by:

• Noticing patterns and relationships (Procedural variation)

• Being able to find and evaluate several methods to solve a problem

• Working with efficiency

• Asking the pupils to ‘convince me’ or prove…

Impact

By the end of Y6 we aim for all pupils to:

Have a deep understanding of the curriculum covered

Be able to reason, problem solve, explain and justify their responses

To feel challenged and have the skills to tackle that challenge

Our higher attaining pupils will have a deep and lasting understanding of the curriculum, the legacy of which will equip them with the possibility to remain higher attaining throughout their journey in education.

Sources of further interesting reading:        

https://www.ncetm.org.uk/resources/46830