Curriculum and Teaching - Our Offer
Our Curriculum at Harper Bell
At Harper Bell, our curriculum is rooted in a strong moral purpose and shaped by three core drivers:
Faith - Aspiration - Excellence
These drivers reflect our ambition for every pupil. We want children to develop strong values and character, believe confidently in what they can achieve and experience a curriculum that expects academic excellence regardless of starting point, background or additional need.
Our curriculum is designed around the expectations and ambition of the National Curriculum, together with the statutory requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage and Religious Education. Within this framework, we have carefully considered the knowledge, vocabulary, concepts and subject-specific understanding that pupils need to acquire from Reception to Year 6.
Our aim is not simply to cover content, but to ensure that pupils build knowledge securely over time. Learning is carefully sequenced so that new knowledge connects to what pupils already know and prepares them for what comes next.
Progression at Harper Bell therefore means that pupils increasingly know more, remember more, understand more and apply what they know with growing confidence and independence.
We place strong emphasis on retrieval and purposeful revisiting. Important learning is returned to regularly through our Strong Starts, questioning, cumulative review and opportunities to apply prior knowledge. This helps pupils retain important knowledge over time and enables teachers to identify where understanding is secure and where further teaching is needed.
Our curriculum is also designed to make pupils think hard. Children are expected to explain, reason, justify, make connections, solve problems and apply their knowledge in increasingly complex situations. We want pupils to become intellectually curious, resilient and confident learners who are prepared well for the next stage of their education.
Each subject is planned with its own disciplinary rigour. Pupils do not simply learn facts; they also develop the vocabulary, concepts and ways of thinking that are distinctive to different subjects. This enables them to develop increasingly secure knowledge and to think more deeply as historians, scientists, geographers, mathematicians, writers, artists and other subject specialists.
Curriculum, Culture and Life in Modern Britain
Our curriculum prepares pupils to participate confidently and responsibly in modern Britain.
Through curriculum subjects, Religious Education, Relationships and Health Education, collective worship, personal development and wider school life, pupils develop an age-appropriate understanding of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs.
These principles are reflected in pupils' everyday experience of school. Children are encouraged to express their views respectfully, understand rights and responsibilities, appreciate that people may hold different beliefs and perspectives, and contribute positively to their school and wider community.
Our curriculum also exposes pupils to a wide range of people, places, traditions, cultures, beliefs and perspectives.
We use a Windows and Mirrors approach to support this. Pupils should sometimes recognise aspects of their own lives and experiences within what they learn, while also being given meaningful opportunities to encounter people and perspectives far beyond their immediate experience.
This helps develop empathy, respect, curiosity, cultural understanding and a strong sense of belonging.
Teaching and Learning at Harper Bell
Under the leadership of Deputy Head Teacher, Mrs Ndaji, teaching and learning is underpinned by a consistent, evidence-informed whole-school approach to pedagogy.
We recognise that an ambitious curriculum is only effective when it is translated into strong classroom practice. Our teaching therefore brings together curriculum knowledge, explicit instruction, questioning, assessment, participation and adaptive teaching.
Across Harper Bell, our teaching and learning cycle is:
Connect and Engage → Explain and Model → Practice → Review
This creates consistency across the school while allowing teachers to use their professional judgement and subject expertise.
Teachers begin by connecting new learning to what pupils already know. Prior knowledge is activated and checked so that gaps and misconceptions can be identified early.
New learning is then explained and modelled clearly. Complex ideas are broken into manageable steps, important vocabulary is taught explicitly and pupils are shown what successful thinking and learning look like.
Our agreed principle of:
I do → We do → You do
supports the gradual transfer of responsibility from teacher to pupil. Teachers model first, pupils practise with guidance and then move towards increasing independence.
Practice is purposeful and designed to secure both fluency and understanding. Pupils have opportunities to rehearse important knowledge and skills, but also to think deeply, explain their reasoning and apply what they know in unfamiliar contexts.
At each stage, teachers review learning and decide what needs to happen next. This may include revisiting prior knowledge, providing further modelling, addressing misconceptions, adjusting support or increasing challenge.
Teaching is therefore both carefully planned and highly responsive.
Checking for Understanding
A defining feature of teaching at Harper Bell is our focus on understanding what every pupil is thinking and learning.
Teachers do not rely only on volunteers or the responses of a small number of confident pupils. Instead, they use consistent questioning and participation routines to ensure that all pupils are expected to think, contribute and show what they understand.
Strategies such as Cold Call, Turn and Talk, ABC questioning, Show Me and other shared routines help teachers gather information about pupils' understanding throughout the lesson.
This allows misconceptions to be identified early and teaching to be adapted immediately.
Checking for understanding is therefore not something that happens only at the end of a lesson. It is a continuous part of effective teaching.
Participation and Classroom Culture
We believe that strong participation is essential to strong learning.
Our classrooms are designed so that:
Everyone thinks, everyone participates and everyone's understanding matters.
Through our shared STARS routines, pupils learn how to listen, discuss, respond, transition and work independently in a calm and purposeful way.
Consistent participation also helps ensure that quieter pupils, pupils with SEND, pupils learning English as an additional language and pupils who may lack confidence are fully involved in learning.
No child should become invisible within the classroom.
Adaptive Teaching and Inclusion
Inclusion is an integral part of teaching and curriculum delivery at Harper Bell.
Our approach reflects the principles of the Birmingham SEND Toolkits and the graduated Assess-Plan-Do-Review process.
Our starting point is that pupils with SEND should access the same ambitious curriculum as their peers wherever appropriate. Teachers identify the barriers that may prevent pupils from succeeding and adapt their teaching to remove those barriers.
This may include additional modelling, smaller steps, explicit vocabulary teaching, visual or concrete resources, structured scaffolds, targeted questioning, additional guided practice, pre-teaching, repetition and overlearning.
Our guiding principle is:
Same ambitious curriculum - different support where needed.
Support is used to enable access to ambitious learning, not to reduce expectations unnecessarily. As pupils become more secure, scaffolding is reduced so that independence and confidence can develop.
Teachers consider pupils' starting points carefully, but starting points are not allowed to become ceilings on achievement.
Assessment and Feedback
Assessment at Harper Bell is used primarily to understand what pupils know and what teaching needs to happen next.
Teachers use questioning, retrieval, observation, written work and formal assessment to identify secure learning, gaps and misconceptions.
This information is then used to decide whether learning needs to be revisited, retaught, practised further or moved forward.
Feedback is designed to move learning forward.
Teachers use live feedback and feedforward wherever possible so that misconceptions and errors can be addressed while pupils are still engaged in the learning. Pupils are expected to respond actively to feedback and improve their work.
The value of feedback is judged by whether pupils understand more, correct mistakes and improve future learning.
Developing Expert Teachers
High-quality curriculum implementation depends upon strong professional development.
Our staff development deliberately connects curriculum knowledge with classroom practice.
Teachers participate in weekly professional development, instructional coaching, StepLab, focused learning walks and subject leadership development.
Our current coaching programme develops a shared repertoire of high-impact teaching techniques, including participation, questioning, modelling, checking for understanding and extending pupil thinking.
This gives staff a common language for teaching while allowing them to continually refine and improve their practice.
Our Consistency-Practice-Sustain approach ensures that improvement is not simply introduced, but embedded and sustained over time.
Curriculum Leadership and Quality Assurance
Subject leaders are expected to know how well their curriculum is being implemented and how successfully pupils are learning it.
Monitoring therefore goes beyond checking whether curriculum plans exist.
Leaders review pupils' work, talk to pupils, visit lessons and consider assessment information to understand whether pupils are building secure knowledge over time.
They consider whether curriculum sequencing is effective, whether pupils remember previous learning, whether important vocabulary and concepts are secure, whether pupils with SEND and other groups are accessing the intended curriculum and whether agreed teaching principles are being implemented consistently.
This information is used to strengthen curriculum planning, refine teaching and identify priorities for professional development.
Faith Within Our Curriculum
Faith is a distinctive and important foundation of life at Harper Bell.
Our Christian vision shapes our relationships, expectations, moral purpose and understanding of service to others.
Through Religious Education, collective worship, prayer and reflection, pupils are given opportunities to explore Christianity, other faiths and worldviews and to consider significant questions about belief, morality, meaning and human responsibility.
Christian values such as love, service, justice, forgiveness, compassion, perseverance and hope are reflected in the way pupils are encouraged to treat others and approach their learning.
Faith does not replace the integrity of individual curriculum subjects. Instead, it provides an ethical and moral framework that helps pupils consider how the knowledge they acquire can shape the way they understand themselves, other people and the wider world.
Our Curriculum Ambition
Ultimately, our curriculum aims to develop pupils who are:
Knowledgeable, articulate, curious, resilient, compassionate, ambitious and intellectually confident.
By the time pupils leave Harper Bell, we want them to possess a secure and connected body of knowledge, the confidence to think independently, the vocabulary to express their ideas precisely, the ability to participate successfully in further education and society and the belief that their future should not be limited by their starting points.
At Harper Bell, curriculum, teaching and culture are deliberately aligned. Pupils experience a carefully sequenced curriculum, regularly retrieve and revisit important knowledge, are expected to think hard and participate fully, and receive the support they need to access the same ambitious learning.