Vision

At St Martins, our high-quality computing education will equip pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and appreciate their place in the modern world. They will be digitally literate, understand how to manipulate and interpret information technology and be confident programmers with a broad knowledge of computer science. Our children will have an exceptional understanding of how to stay safe online, enabling them to interact within the digital world in a safe and responsible way. 

Rationale 

Computing Curriculum

Our Computing curriculum is planned and taught through the Teach Computing Curriculum. The Teach Computing Curriculum uses the National Centre for Computing Education’s computing taxonomy to ensure comprehensive coverage of the subject. 

The units for key stages 1 and 2 are based on a spiral curriculum. This means that each of the themes is revisited regularly (at least once in each year group), and pupils revisit each theme through a new unit that consolidates and builds on prior learning within that theme. Each lesson is sequenced so that it builds on the learning from the previous lesson, and where appropriate, activities are scaffolded so that all pupils can succeed and thrive. This style of curriculum design reduces the amount of knowledge lost through forgetting, as topics are revisited yearly. It also ensures that connections are made even if different teachers are teaching the units within a theme in consecutive years. The Teach Computing Curriculum acknowledges that physical computing plays an important role in modern pedagogical approaches to computing, both as a tool to engage pupils and as a strategy to develop pupils understanding in more creative ways. 

Online Safety

The ProjectEVOLVE toolkit is based on UKCIS framework “Education for a Connected World” (EFACW) that covers knowledge, skills, behaviours and attitudes across eight strands of our online lives from early years right through to eighteen. It offers engaging and focussed activities written by leading experts to engage and inform children and young people around important steps forward in their online development.

Please see below for coverage and progression documents for our computing scheme of learning and for our online safety curriculum. Please note that the overview shows the units we teach which can then be cross-referenced with the other documents.