At Beechwood, we want our pupils to think for themselves and care for others. Computing is a pivotal area of knowledge that will support our children with their future ambitions. Our aim is to provide a positive and nurturing environment that promotes independent and critical thinking when using technology, while also encouraging children to approach problems in a caring way.

Through our Computing curriculum at Beechwood, we aim to give our pupils the life skills that will enable them to embrace and utilise new technology, which will inevitably play a pivotal role in their lives. Therefore, we want to model and educate our pupils on how to use technology positively, responsibly and safely. Computing teaches our children essential skills that they will use throughout their lives. By understanding how to use technology, our children will be able to formulate and innovate solutions to complex problems.

As soon as children come to our school, they are encouraged to explore the technology around them. As a school, we use Kapow as our carefully selected scheme of work for Computing; however, we further enhance this with additional opportunities for children to develop their computing skills through our partnership with Daresbury Labs and our Coding Clubs.

Lessons are designed to encourage children to think creatively and find solutions to the problems they face, with e-safety at the heart of this, ensuring that our children learn from an early age how to stay safe online. We want our pupils to understand that there is always a choice when using technology, and as a school, we utilise technology to model positive use. We recognise that the best prevention for many of the issues we currently see with technology and social media is through education. Building knowledge in this subject will allow pupils to effectively demonstrate their learning through the creative use of technology.

We recognise that technology allows pupils to share their learning in innovative ways, and we also understand the accessibility opportunities it can provide. Our knowledge-rich curriculum must be balanced with opportunities for pupils to apply their knowledge creatively, which will, in turn, help them become skilful computer scientists. We encourage staff to embed computing across the whole curriculum to make learning creative and accessible.

We want our pupils to be fluent with a range of tools to best express their understanding, and we hope that by Upper Key Stage 2, children will have the independence and confidence to choose the most appropriate tool to fulfil the tasks and challenges set by teachers. All of this is also supplemented through other areas of the curriculum and one-off theme days. By the time they leave us, we aim for pupils to be able to use the internet safely and responsibly and to know what to do if something happens online that makes them feel uncomfortable.

By using retrieval tasks in each lesson, as well as formative assessment throughout each unit, we are able to ensure that pupils gain the knowledge they need to meet the requirements of the National Curriculum. Our children can apply the knowledge from their computing lessons to other areas of the curriculum and can speak confidently about staying safe online