Curriculum Intent

At Harcourt Primary School, it is our intention to provide a high-quality Science education that provides children with the foundations they need in order to recognise the importance of Science in every aspect of daily life. We believe that Science should be a hands-on, engaging, and practical experience for all children. We strive to ensure that the Science curriculum we provide offers children with the confidence, passion and ambition to continue to develop their scientific skills as they progress through their education.

Our Science curriculum aims to cultivate a curiosity in all children and while engaging in the broad science offer, the children will gain specific skills and knowledge to assist them in thinking scientifically, gaining an understanding of scientific processes, as well as an understanding of the uses and implications of science today and in the future. We carefully follow the National Curriculum for Primary Science and through our progressive, carefully considered, knowledge-rich lessons, children build on their existing schemas, allowing them to continuously develop and strengthen their scientific knowledge, language and skills in order to apply this to new concepts, experiences and enquiries. We want to create a science curriculum that fosters knowledge acquisition and learning development as well as to empower the children with a deep grasp of the world in which they live; we want our children to be passionate about Science. Science learning at Harcourt Primary School is built around a well-sequenced and knowledge-rich curriculum that ensures prior knowledge is built upon as children move through the key stages: units on light, for example, are delivered in Year 3 and then again in Year 6 to ensure that prior learning can be revisited, retrieved and then built upon further.

Alongside delivering a knowledge-rich curriculum, we also value and look at the practical skills of scientific enquiry. We encourage the children to ask questions and challenge their findings during scientific experiments. Our scientists seek to problem solve, create and are always keen to explain their thinking using subject specific vocabulary. We give the teaching and learning of Science high prominence. Our curriculum enables children to become enquiry-based learners, collaborating through the researching, investigating and evaluating of experiences. We place scientific investigation at the heart of our progressive Science curriculum to enable the children to be equipped for life to ask and answer scientific questions about the world around them.