Curriculum Intent

The computing curriculum has the purpose of equipping pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world. The computing curriculum has deep cross curricular links with maths, Science, and DT. Computing ensures that pupils are digitally literate and are able to use and express themselves and develop their ideas through information and communication technology. The ‘Purple Mash’ platform is used in order to teach Computing; this has progressive units of work that develop a pupil’s computational skills throughout their school career. The themes for each unit ensure that all the National Curriculum objectives are covered so that all the learners in our federation receive a broad and balanced curriculum. Units include: coding and computational thinking, spreadsheets, Internet and email, art and design, music, databases and graphing, writing and presenting and communication and networks.

Progression

Units are taught in a progressive format; for example, pupils learn coding at the start of the year, before moving on to other units of work that require coding. Equally, pupils will study online safety, before they look at how to send and receive emails and search the Internet effectively. With coding for instance, progression is shown through pupils initially having to explain what an algorithm is and use and plan a set of instructions to complete a task. In Key Stage Two, this progresses to pupils designing and algorithm carefully, thinking about what they want it to do and how they can turn it into code. Pupils also have to identify errors in code and fix these. All units of work (as per the Computing curriculum overviews) are written with this progression at its core.