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.

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).