Orrell Lamberhead Green
Computing at Lamberhead Green Academy
Curriculum Intent
In an ever-changing digital world, with advances in technology considerably changing, our children need to be equipped with the skills and experiences to be prepared to participate and succeed in modern society. We want our children to be creators and innovators, not just consumers of digital content. Our children are taught to understand that technology is an integral part of modern life and the key to the future is to harness and understand technology’s potential. Computing is a constantly evolving subject that involves solving complex problems, collaborating with others, learning from mistakes, and refining solutions.
The study of Computing allows our children to access the skills to develop as effective computational thinkers by developing their understanding of Computer Science. We want our children to be competent, confident, and creative uses of information and technology, which allows your child to spark different talents and interests. We want our children to understand how to practice and become active participants in the modern world by teaching our children to be digitally literate respectfully when communicating online.
At Orrell Lamberhead Green, we want to support, inspire, and prepare our children to have the skills to adapt and thrive in the current and future digital world.
Support:
We value the importance of our role in educating and developing your child’s understanding of the digital world. We recognise the importance of Computing in our curriculum and what it can offer our children. During your child’s journey at Orrell Lamberhead Green, our highly trained staff work hard to identify your child’s unique starting points by developing the whole child during the Early Years. Using the Barefoot Computing resources, our Computing Early Years curriculum has been directly linked to the Early Learning Goals (2023) to support your child’s development as well as developing their problem-solving skills in everyday life as computational thinkers by nurturing their ability to logically reason, spot patterns such as sequences and repetitions, understanding algorithms, decompose and debug different problems by tinkering, exploring, collaborating, and preserving in new learning including the use of physical computing resources such as Coding Caterpillars and Beebots. These foundations skills weave throughout our curriculum increasing in complexity. In addition, we ensure our children are immediately introduced to safely supporting their journey as participants in the digital world.
Our Computing curriculum offers lots of speaking and listening opportunities for our children. We aim to create discussion, debate and evaluative skills of different computer processes and actively encourage our children to explain and develop their thinking. We appreciate the complex terminology an ever-changing can bring. Therefore, we particularly focus on allowing our children opportunities to verbalise, explain and retrieve Computing vocabulary to ensure our children have an adequate understanding of different concepts in addition to effectively reviewing your child’s learning journey. We also encourage our children to become digitally literate by teaching them how to respectfully converse in a safe and secure educational platform, Seesaw, which we use to record our work through online journals. We ensure throughout our school that we maintain high standards of behaviour to support our Computing curriculum by teaching our children how to look after resources around school.
Our curriculum is created and updated by Knowsley City Learning Centres. A progressive, sequential, and thoughtful curriculum has been developed and regularly updated by active practitioners in Education. This ensures complete coverage of the National Curriculum, enabling us to support our children to become competent, confident, and creative across the three strands of Computing: Computer Science, Digital Literacy and Information Technology. This makes it bespoke and tailored towards our setting, something our practitioners in school tailor further to support the needs of all children. This will also include your child’s ability to connect to Computing emotionally and socially through identified icons such as Alan Turing and Katherine Johnson. We value our role in supporting our wider school community. As a school, we aim to provide our families with current advice to help their child at home via parental workshops, monthly newsletters and posting tips for families to consider on our school communication channels.
Inspire:
We want all children to be inspired learners to ensure they are open-minded to adapt to the ever-changing world. By the time our children complete their educational journey, technological advances may have changed our world. Therefore, we appreciate that the core Computing skills taught will allow our children to utilise these skills to contribute to society effectively. It is vital our children can see and relate to modern-day successes. Developing our computing experiences for our children to connect to speakers and local people and developing meaningful visits and experiences will ensure our children are inspired to impact the digital world positively. Through our extra-curricular offer, we encourage our children to aim to take responsibility for our curriculum through Year 6 Digi-Leaders, training and developing our children’s understanding to support other children across the school. In addition, other extra-curricular opportunities across the school open to all children promote new interests for your child to which they may not have previously known existed within themselves, creating a thirst for learning.
Prepare:
Your child will directly gain from a carefully and deliberately planned curriculum through Knowsley City Learning Centres, which active practitioners have developed, allowing our children to be fully supported through their Computing journey across all three strands. Each computing unit is planned to provide new challenges and variety, to ensure we keep the child’s interest at a maximum. There is a strong emphasis on core fundamental digital skills and computational concepts. We actively review our sequential curriculum to ensure our children leave our setting prepared with the key foundations to prepare them for the future steps in their educational journey, preparing them to strive to provide safe opportunities in Computing to motivate, inspire and raise standards across the curriculum. Everyone in our school community will be equipped with the digital skills to meet developing technology with confidence and enthusiasm, preparing them for a future in an ever-changing world.
Due to the demands of an ever-changing world, our locality and preparedness for the wider world, we ensure our children are ready to participate safely online. Through our delivery of the Digital Literacy strand, Knowsley City Learning Centre supports the aims of the government’s Internet Safety Strategy through the Education for a Connected World document as devised by the UK Council for Internet Safety (UKCIS) of supporting children to stay safe and make a positive contribution online, as well enabling teachers to develop effective strategies for understanding and handling online risks.
