Computing

Why we teach Computing:

Within an ever changing and technological world, Queen’s Manor Primary School understands and values the importance of teaching Computing from a young age. We acknowledge that future generations will rely heavily on their computational confidence and digital skills in order to support their progress within their chosen career paths. Queen’s Manor Primary School is committed to delivering the three strands of the Computing curriculum (Computer Science, Information Technology and Digital Literacy) to ensure our students can thrive in an increasingly digital world. We value the use of technology to teach logical thinking and as a tool to enhance all other areas of learning.

Computing is an integral part to a child’s education and everyday life. Consequently, we intend to support our pupils to access and understand the core principles of this subject through engaging and activities. Whilst ensuring they understand the advantages and disadvantages associated with online experiences, we want children to develop as respectful, responsible and confident users of technology, aware of measures that can be taken to keep themselves and others safe online.

At Queen’s Manor Primary School, students learn the principles of Computer Science and develop the skills to create their own applications. We want our students to create meaningful projects throughout their time and have ownership over what they create. Within Information Technology we ensure all students have a secure understanding of the types of systems that they interact with daily and feel confident understanding the world around then. Developing perseverance to establish a positive culture around mistakes to support debugging is central to our approach to coding. All students are given the opportunity to practice their Digital Literacy through cross-curricular work and explicit teaching of key skills. For example: word processing, spreadsheets, creating images and publishing.

We also want to ensure that students become digitally literate – able to use, and express themselves and develop their ideas through, information and communication technology – at a level suitable for the future workplace and as active participants in a digital world.

Our Computing Curriculum aims are: 

• To instil an enthusiasm and appreciation of Computing via engaging and well-planned lessons, allowing children to use their skills to create and develop new ideas.
• To follow a scheme of work, in conjunction with the National Curriculum, which provides progression and a breadth of knowledge across all year groups.
• To ensure that teaching staff continue to access the opportunities to attend subject relevant CPD in order to deliver sessions with confidence and to help identify areas in which they can use computational skills within a cross-curricular approach (as part of their termly topics, for example).
• To identify real world examples and creative challenges in which pupils can explore and extend their understanding of the fundamental principles and concepts of Computing.
• To ensure that pupils develop a respectful and responsible attitude towards using information and communication technology, especially with regards to their own and other’s safety.
• To provide a safe space in which pupils can navigate and interact with the digital world, whilst exploring their own personal expression and identity.

What our curriculum looks like:

At Queen’s Manor Primary School, we follow the ‘Purple Mash - Computing’ scheme of work which covers all aspects of the National Curriculum. This scheme was chosen as it has been created by subject experts and based on the latest pedagogical research. It provides an innovative progression framework where computing content (concepts, knowledge, skills and objectives) has been organised into interconnected networks called vertical concepts.

The curriculum aims to equip young people with the knowledge, skills and understanding they need to thrive in the digital world of today and the future. The curriculum can be broken down into 3 strands: computer science, information technology and digital literacy, with the aims of the curriculum reflecting this distinction.

This scheme of work gives full coverage of the national curriculum for computing aims to ensure all pupils:

• can understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation (Computer science)
• can analyse problems in computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve such problems (Computer science)
• can evaluate and apply information technology, including new or unfamiliar technologies, analytically to solve problems (Information technology)
• are responsible, competent, confident and creative users of information and communication technology. (Digital literacy)
• A key part of implementing our computing curriculum is to ensure that safety of our pupils is paramount. We take online safety very seriously and we aim to give children the necessary skills to keep themselves safe online. Children have a right to enjoy childhood online, to access safe online spaces and to benefit from all the opportunities that a connected world can bring them, appropriate to their age and stage. Online safety and responsible use of technology are topics covered in computing and PSHE lessons, assemblies and during events such as Safer Internet Day.

Our Computing curriculum consists of the following key themes:

• E-safety and Online Safety
• Coding and Computational thinking
• Spreadsheets
• Internet and Email
• Art and Design
• Music
• Databases and graphing
• Writing and presenting
• Communication and networks

Our Computing curriculum:

• enables students to be safe and efficient users of technology, allowing them to fully access the powerful resources they offer
• enables students to real world problems and developing their ability to solve them using computational thinking methods
• provokes thought and debate about the positive and negative, legal, ethical and environmental impact technology has on and the world we live in

How we teach Computing:

Computing is taught once a week. Each Purple Mash lesson begins by setting out the learning objective in a real-life context to encourage discussion of the wider use of Computing. From Year 1, all students are expected to memorise and use their personal log-in to develop technological responsibility. After logging-in, teachers set software-related ‘2Dos’ which organise independent tasks into cloud-based folders which can be checked centrally from a teacher account.

Following class discussion and teacher modelling, students complete their independent work and save it into their personal folder. In addition to Purple Mash, students are encouraged to practise touch-typing regularly to develop their digital literacy

Teachers are provided with an additional three planning days per year on top of their PPA, to plan their curriculum.

To help with our implementation of the computing curriculum we have a variety of hardware available, including:

• Laptops
• iPads
• Chromebooks
• Cameras

Each teacher is provided with:

• A laptop
• Interactive Whiteboard
• A class camera

All children are provided with Microsoft Office accounts and work can be accessed in school and remotely. All teaching staff have undergone CPD over lockdown during the Covid pandemic to enable them to deliver content remotely in confidence over Microsoft Teams.

How we measure Computing:

Within Computing, we encourage a creative and collaborative environment in which pupils can learn to express and challenge themselves. The success of the curriculum itself will be assessed via the analysis of termly progress data, lesson observations and prior/post knowledge quizzes. This will then inform future adaptions of the scheme of work and help to ensure that progression is evident throughout school. 

In order to demonstrate that we have accomplished our aims, pupils at Queen’s Manor Primary School should:

• Be enthusiastic and confident in their approach towards Computing.
• Present as competent and adaptable ‘Computational Thinkers’ who are able to use identified concepts and approaches in all of their learning.
• Be able to identify the source of problems and work with perseverance to ‘debug’ them.
• Create and evaluate their own project work.
• Have a secure understanding of the positive applications and specific risks associated with a broad range of digital technology.
• Transition to secondary school with a keen interest in the continued learning of this subject.

Computing