Curriculum Context

Birchwood Junior School sits in the heart of a friendly, close-knit community and is a school that holds moral values at its very core. We are wholly committed to ensuring that, despite the wide spread social and economic challenges for a setting in the top 10% of deprived areas in the country, our children will not only be educated to the highest standards of academic excellence, but also empowered to succeed to their fullest potential. We do this by instilling students with an aspirational mindset.  This ensures that our students are not simply comparing themselves to others or defining success by what other people think. Birchwood students feel safe enough to never give up on being the very best they can be as unique individuals. We celebrate and welcome differences within our school community because though no two people are the same, everyone is equal.

Personal development is a fundamental element of success for a child, and we realise that it requires a curriculum built bespokely for the needs of our students. With that, we have worked with our community to build a curriculum that successfully guides pupils to develop themselves both physically and mentally.

At the very heart our curriculum, is reading. We vow to ensure that every child will be a reader by the time they leave our care.

Though our high expectations never falter, our experience recognises that the journey to success looks different for every child and we embrace that through an entirely inclusive approach. Our school is built upon the foundation of nurture and care, where all staff work to support every student, even in the toughest of personal circumstances. We know that feeling safe is a human requirement, and a human right so we don’t just see nurture as a part of what we do. At Birchwood, it is who we are.

To ensure all students have the prior knowledge they need to succeed and to get excited about learning, we constantly provide enhancement opportunities to engage learning and believe that childhood should be a happy, investigative and enquiring time in our lives where there are no limits to curiosity and there is a thirst for new experiences and knowledge. 

Based on all of this vision, every single member of staff at Birchwood Junior School works to achieve one overarching aim:

To Nurture the Aspirations of each and every student in our care.

We believe this is defined by three primary elements.

To have an aspirational mindset

Be well-rounded and personally developed

Achieve Academic Excellence