Computing
Intent
At Bishop Wood Church of England Junior School, it is our intention to become competent and mindful users of all technologies. Technology is all around us, and we strive for our pupils to finish KS2 with the declarative knowledge and procedural skills necessary to use it effectively and responsibly.
We aim for our pupils to be curious creators and achieve this by encompassing computer science, information technology and digital literacy into our broad curriculum. We want children to be exposed to a variety of different hardware and software, allowing the children to enhance their computational thinking to achieve a desired goal. By focusing on the Bishop Wood Values, children understand that progress can be achieved by making mistakes and learning from them in order to be the best version of themselves. We take both an integrated and direct approach to online safety to ensure that the children understand the importance of using the internet responsibly in school and at home. We aim to model the acceptable use of technology, teach the children to recognise unacceptable behaviours and safeguard each other.
Where purposeful and effective, we encourage staff to embed the use of technology across the curriculum in order to make learning engaging and accessible and provide opportunities for the children to apply their knowledge to a wide range of experiences.
Implementation
Computing is taught using the Purple Mash Scheme. Through a unit-based approach and hands-on experience we strive to develop the children’s declarative knowledge and procedural skills. We implement a Computing curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school, for example, by using Micro:Bits for programming in all year groups to allow pupils to build on their prior learning. Teachers ensure that lessons are inclusive, seek out opportunities to provide challenge and make cross-curricular links where possible.
A discussion around online safety is incorporated into each unit sequence to identify how it is relevant to different areas of the curriculum, as well as presented in assemblies and through Safer Internet Day. The children are also exposed to scenarios and taught to promote online safety using the Safer Internet scheme.
The children have the opportunity to programme, animate and improve office-based skills as well as use computers and other hardware to help develop their learning across all subjects. By linking learning to a range of fun and interesting topics, inviting guest speakers and immersing themselves in STEM week the children also learn how technology is implemented in the wider world.
Impact
The children’s enjoyment and engagement of computing is of the utmost importance to us, so we use pupil voice opportunities to gain feedback, using this to inform future practice. Pupils will be given the opportunity to provide evidence of their learning using the devices throughout each computing unit.
At the end of each Computing lesson, the children save their work on Purple Mash. Verbal feedback is provided in line with the school’s feedback policy and a variety of open and closed questioning strategies are used to make formative assessment.
In order to summatively assess the children’s understanding of what has been taught, teachers will determine whether the children are working at the expected standard or working towards the expected standard for each unit of work. This information will be recorded via our school’s tracking system, reviewed by the teacher and the school’s computing co-ordinator and used to inform future planning and subject development.