The Computing Curriculum

at St Robert Bellarmine

“We are God’s work of art”

At St Robert Bellarmine, through a high-quality computing education, we equip pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and participate more readily in a rapidly changing world. We aim to inspire a love of computing in our children through a curriculum that is designed to engage, inspire and challenge pupils, equipping them with the knowledge and understanding to experiment, invent, create and thrive in the ever-expanding digital world of today and the future. Computing is an increasingly significant part of both professional and personal daily life and we believe that our children should be at the forefront of new technology, with a thirst for digital learning. It has deep links with mathematics, science, and design and technology, and provides insights into both natural and artificial systems. As they progress through school, they should be able to think critically and develop a more rigorous understanding of computing and information technology.

We will assure that the National Curriculum for computing is met by ensuring that all of our pupils experience a wide breadth of study that includes: 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. Computing also ensures that pupils become digitally literate – able to use, and express themselves and develop their ideas through, information and communication technology. We see these 3 pillars of progression as being interconnected, rather than separate entities within the curriculum and knowledge acquisition in one pillar can affect knowledge acquisition in another.

Our Intended Computing Curriculum

Our computing curriculum is built around the aims and objectives set out in the national curriculum. We aim for the computing curriculum content to be remembered in the long term as our basic principles are that learning only takes place if there is a change in the long-term memory.

Our computing curriculum takes a mastery approach. By which we mean pupils master key concepts before moving on to the next topic. Computing is taught as a discrete subject. Planning for learning carefully maps out the progression of knowledge and understanding, that fully covers the National Curriculum. Teachers are clear on the ‘key knowledge’ that we want our pupils to know and remember and this forms the basis of long-term planning for progression. The key knowledge is connected by reference to golden threads or substantive concepts: computing systems and networks, programming, data and information and creating media. These substantive concepts thread through each year group and the same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, students return to the same substantive concepts over and over in different contexts deepening their knowledge and understanding of them in each year group as they progress through school. Our children are able to explore content in increasing depth and complexity as they move through school.  This approach allows us to make connections across the curriculum, whilst also developing the children’s understanding of what makes computing distinct and unique.

We ensure that this learning is undertaken in unison with a systematic development of all aspects of online safety because at St Robert Bellarmine we want to ensure that our children are fully equipped to negotiate the ever-changing digital world, both safely and responsibly. Here, we focus on themes such as privacy, online bullying and healthy relationships, developing and revisiting important aspects of online safety throughout the years, as per the computing progression map.

Curriculum breadth for computing outlines the core knowledge for each topic around which teachers have developed a coherent and deliberately sequenced curriculum to promote the development of pupils’ knowledge and understanding by building upon prior knowledge.

Curriculum depth in computing allows for children to grow in their knowledge by first remembering more, progressing to knowing more which they can then draw on as they create, reason and explain their own works of computing.

We understand how important academic and subject specific vocabulary is in the acquisition of knowledge. Consequently, teachers ensure that this is planned for and taught throughout computing topics.

We determine progress as 'remembering more and knowing more'. We believe that when new knowledge and existing knowledge connect in pupils’ minds, this gives rise to understanding. 

We look for children, as their knowledge and understanding develops, to show that they can make connections, draw parallels and use increasingly sophisticated explanations which draw upon their computing knowledge.

Our Learnt Computing Curriculum

 The impact of our curriculum can be measured through two main questions

• How well are our pupils coping with the curriculum content?

• How well are they retaining previously taught content?

The vast majority of pupils have sustained mastery of the content, that is they remember more and are fluent in it. Activities are planned for pupils to combine this remembered knowledge and fluency with the opportunities to create, reason and demonstrate their depth of understanding. We regularly monitor pupils to ensure that they are on track to reach the expectations of our computing curriculum.

Our Enacted Computing Curriculum

Our curriculum design is based upon evidence from cognitive science. Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction are fundamental in the day-to-day teaching of lessons. The main principles that underpin this are:

• regular reviews and the revisiting of prior learning
• continual checking of understanding through effective questioning
• strong teacher modelling and guided practice
• carefully sequenced lessons that use ‘chunked learning’, allowing new learning to be retained
• precise feedback for our children

In addition, we also understand that learning is invisible in the short term. Cognitive science tells us that in order for pupils to have a greater depth of understanding and sustain mastery they must first master the basics, which takes time.

A coherent and deliberately sequenced computing curriculum ensures that we practise things repeatedly so children get better at them, and we revise things on a regular basis so that they don’t forget them.

To explore how this curriculum area is taught in your child's class please refer to their class page.