At East Farleigh Primary School, our intent is to approach science with a deeper, more engaging curriculum. With a mastery approach, to accelerate higher order thinking, the children will feel inspired and be equipped with the skills, and knowledge necessary to follow their own natural curiosity, applying the scientific inquiry and reasoning skills they have learnt to other settings, challenges and experiences in their lives.

The children will develop as scientists, with the foundations for understanding the world through the specific disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics. All children will be taught essential aspects of the knowledge, methods, processes and uses of science. They will be empowered with skills of observation, scrutiny, questioning, comparison and contrast, ordering and evaluation. They will become passionate enquirers and be utterly absorbed by the world around them; inspired to push boundaries of understanding through observation, testing, and hypothesising questions they have created themselves.

The ambition of the science curriculum is to excite through the tangible experiences and investigations that are taught. With this wonder, we create curiosity within the children for them to want to question, explore and discover further. We aim to inspire and capture the minds of the children which therefore leads them to question the world around us and become lifelong learners.

The science curriculum at East Farleigh Primary School aims to ensure that all children develop scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding through the scientific disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics; develop understanding of the nature, processes and methods of science through different types of science enquiries that help them to answer scientific questions about the world around them; and are equipped with the scientific knowledge required to understand the uses and implications of science, today and in the future.

Using the Kent Scheme, National Curriculum and Chris Quigley’s Essentials Curriculum, we have designed a whole-school curriculum that demonstrates clear progression; each topic, concept and skill is built upon systematically term-by-term and year-by-year. There is a rich variety of ‘working scientifically’ investigations that involve tangible experiences for children to learn how to conduct a fair test, seek patterns in results, conduct and observe experiments over time and discover how to group and classify. We have constructed our curriculum not only for the children to have a breadth of knowledge but to also have meaningful depth. The science curriculum has been developed alongside the Essentials Curriculum which supports each step of a scientific enquiry to ensure that children methodically follow through to verify and compare their findings, devise their own experiments and apply their knowledge to the world around them.

The science curriculum can be embedded into a termly topic but if the subject matter doesn’t link the lessons are to be taught discretely. This is essential to secure the science aims of the National Curriculum, develop their understanding of nature, processes and methods of science through different enquiries and to question the world around them. We will equip the children with scientific knowledge to understand the uses of and implications of science today and for the future.

Our pupils should be able to organise their knowledge, skills and understanding around the following learning hooks:

These key concepts or as we like to explain them to children – learning hooks, underpin learning in each milestone. This enables pupils to reinforce and build upon prior learning, make connections and develop subject specific language.

As part of our curriculum philosophy, built on around the concept of mastery and learning being a change to long-term memory, it is impossible to see impact in the short term. We do, however, use assessment based on deliberate practice. This means that we look at the practices taking place to determine whether they are appropriate, related to our goals and likely to produce results in the long run. We use comparative judgement in two ways: in the tasks we set (POP tasks) and in comparing a child's work over time. We also use lesson observations to see if the pedagogical style matches our depth expectations.

End of year teacher assessments, which take into account engagement in lessons, quality of outcomes and results from any POP/ summative tasks, help to form a judgement about a child's attainment within the subject. These judgements are made in relation to a child's progress towards mastering biannual milestones against four essential threshold concepts (see above).