Computing

Our children are the future. We foresee a world where ICT skills and understanding will be a requirement for everyday life and a key element to success. Our children need to be ready and eager to meet this challenge. To facilitate this, ICT will be an embedded aspect of school life, ever present, working behind the scenes to motivate, facilitate and enhance every child’s learning.

At Bidston Village C.E. Primary School our aims are to:

Allow children to achieve specific computing skills as set down in the schools scheme of work and to celebrate their success

Allow children to appreciate the relevance of computing as an integral part of everyday life and show ICT to be an essential tool for learning, communication, finding information and for controlling and understanding their environment.

Allow staff and children to gain confidence in and enjoyment from, the use of ICT through creativity and innovation.

Allow staff to develop professionally by enhancing their teaching skills, management skills, administrative skills and communication.

Maintain a school website that promotes the school and its pupils, communicates with the community and celebrates our achievements.

Prepare children for adult life by exposing the opportunities computing skills provide, both for recreation and employment.

Utilise the expertise of outside agencies to provide our children with opportunities not available within the school curriculum.

Provide opportunities of benefit to the wider community

Hi-Impact

Since 2019 Hi-Impact have been involved in helping us to plan and implement a curriculum for Computing throughout the school, as well as providing staff training and technical support. They have worked with staff and school leaders to ensure that we have a curriculum that fits into out broader vision for the school and fulfils the requirements of the National Curriculum for computing. Each year group has ensured coverage that dovetails with the rest of the curriculum to make computing relevant to their other studies.

Teaching

Computing is taught as both a discrete subject for programming and digital literacy, and as in integrated subject to support other curriculum areas. This allows us to focus on areas of the curriculum that require the greatest urgency and level of new knowledge and skills, but we recognise that all areas of the computing curriculum have application to other subjects and to the broader lives of the children.

Our programming skills are developed by the use of Code.org, where each child from Year 1 and above, has an account. For our digital literacy, we use the sequence of lessons from Common Sense Media in KS2 and use Hectors World and The adventures of Kara with the younger children.

Subscriptions

The school currently has a subscription to Purple Mash, an online software suite from 2Simple.

This software is often used in school, and is a useful tool for literacy throughout the curriculum.

The link to the PurpleMash site is here.

Your child can log onto the site using their normal school website details.

We also use free accounts provided by Code.org and Common Sense Media as mentioned previously.

We have recently taken a subscription to Digimaps for School to increase our use of digital mapping technologies within the wider curriculum.

Ar Bidston village, children see computing and the wider use of technoloy as fun, engaging and useful. They know that computing skills are applicable in all areas of their lives and are vital for their future interaction with the world at large, whether it be for personal enjoyment or for work. They appreciate that communication, creativity and productivity can all be enhanced through the use of technology and see how it can provide a world of opportunity. At all times they are aware of the issues of online safety and are better prepared to deal with issues as they arise and where to go for help. Our children go to secondary education ready to tackle the KS3 curriculum and beyond.

For the last few years we have engaged with Internet Safety Day by using the excellent Altru Theatre group who put on a fabulous show about e-safety issues and run workshops for the older children. These have proved invaluable for raising the profile of e-safety as well and bringing greater awareness of the issues to both the children and staff.

Our planning was written with consultants from Hi Impact to create a bespoke curriculum which would cover the National Curriculum requirements in a way that was engaging and relevant to our children.

The core skills are taught across the curriculum, using the children’s work in the other subject areas as our starting point.

Buttons linking to these plans are available further down this page.