Intent

Twickenham Primary School is a place for outstanding academic excellence. Our school motto 'Be all you can be' is the basis of everything that we do.

We are a school where every child aspires to attain academic achievement to the best of their abilities. We believe all our children will develop a lifelong love of learning through engagement in our exciting and ambitious computing curriculum, taught by excellent teachers.

Our children are the heart of our science curriculum design.  Our curriculum is well sequenced, ambitious, and connected. It recognises individuality and encourages cooperation and community mindedness. The big ideas that sculpt and shape our curriculum prepare children academically, socially, and emotionally for the next steps towards adulthood.

Our computing curriculum is broad and balanced, and progressively builds on skills, knowledge and conceptual understanding year on year.  It equips pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world

Our teaching, assessment and feedback leads to long-term learning and prepares our children for secondary education and beyond.

Our computing curriculum is wrapped around our core values of respect, responsibility and investigation. Computing has deep links with mathematics, science, and design and technology, and provides insights into both natural and artificial systems. Through carefully planning our curriculum journey, computing has become fully synchronised within our wider study topic cycle, to ensure links between other subjects make the learning journey meaningful. There are strands of computational thinking and computer science that ensures progress from year to year.

Implementation

As a school, we use the National Curriculum as a starting point, and deepen further using adapted projects from Barefoot Computing. Projects are flexible and have been adapted to consider the needs, strengths, and community context of our children.

The core of computing is computer science, in which pupils are taught the principles of information and computation, how digital systems work, and how to put this knowledge to use through programming. Building on this knowledge and understanding, pupils are equipped to use information technology to create programs, systems and a range of content.

Our computing projects are timetabled either as weekly sessions, or as block projects, depending on the content. These projects allow for children to embed their substantive knowledge in new and often real-life context, usually with a group of their peers.

The sequencing of projects ensures that children have the substantive knowledge and vocabulary to comprehend subsequent projects fully. Each project’s place in the year has also been carefully considered. For example, in year 3 where the children make data bases about volcanoes, they use database creating software such as j2data to create fields using the information they have gathered from research.

Teachers create a positive attitude to the use of digital technology within their classrooms and reinforce an expectation that all children can apply their skills across a variety of different scenarios, across different areas of learning. They have strong subject knowledge that includes modelling key vocabulary throughout lessons to enable our children to be familiar with and use vocabulary accurately. 

Computing also ensures that pupils become digitally literate – able to use, and express themselves and develop their ideas through, information and communication technology. Children’s knowledge and skills develop progressively as they move through the school, not only to enable them to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum but to prepare them to become responsible digital citizens and competent users of a range of different technologies in secondary education.

Impact

Enjoyment of the computing curriculum promotes achievement, confidence, and good behaviour. Pupils have a strong desire to embrace challenges and to be resilient learners.

Our children make connections across their learning: between subjects, between year groups, between themes learnt within one year. Our children embed their learning and recall knowledge. They can apply, justify, and communicate their knowledge and learning effectively using relevant and appropriate vocabulary.

Our computing curriculum is well coordinated. The subject leader monitors the coverage and quality of computing across the school.

Teachers plan to provide the greatest breadth and balance of activities to deepen the children’s understanding of the digital world and ensure lessons are engaging and challenging.

Teachers plan for intervention and challenge within the curriculum to ensure all pupils make good or better progress and can recall previous knowledge well. Children are assessed during every lesson, which enables our teachers to plan the next steps for each child.  Teachers assess against the learning objectives and the basic skill requirements for each year group. This enables pupils to make progress within individual lessons and over time. 

 At Twickenham Primary, we will measure the impact of our curriculum through:

• attainment and progress data
• attendance rates
• behaviour records
• pupil interviews, book scrutinies and subject observations
• curriculum reviewing and the sharing of good practice with peers

At the end of our computing curriculum journey, children will:

• Be able to understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation
• Be able to analyse problems in computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve such problems
• Be able to evaluate and apply information technology, including new or unfamiliar technologies, analytically to solve problems
• Be responsible, competent, confident and creative users of information and communication technology.

Staying safe online

Digital Literacy is the ability and skill to find, evaluate, utilise, share, and create content using information technologies and the Internet. In developing our pupils as digital citizens, we need to make sure they know how to use technology safely, respectfully and responsibly. 

Our online safety discussions in Assembly, PSHE and computing lessons focus on:

• The subject of ownership, permissions and the use of digital resources
• Recognising acceptable and unacceptable behaviour
• Defining phishing and why it is used by cyber criminals
• Learning about the use of variables and conditional loops in code,
• Creating stronger, more secure pins and passwords.

Computational thinking

Computational thinking is about looking at a problem in a way in which a computer can help us to solve it. This is a two-step process:

1. First, we think about the steps needed to solve a problem.
2. Then, we use our technical skills to get the computer working on the problem. 

It involves 6 different concepts and 5 approaches to working.

Computational thinking and creativity helps us to understand and change the world.

Computer science 

Computer science encompasses the theory, design, development and use of computer systems.

Computer science involves 14 different concepts

Studying computer science allows us to design, develop and use computer systems worldwide.

Programming

Teaching Programming using Scratch, Kodu and Lego.

We use the PRIMM approach

Our computing journey