INTENT

At St Margaret's at Troy Town, we strongly believe that the use of ICT and the development of computing skills are crucial for our pupils’ education and as a part of their everyday life skills. In order to equip our children for the modern world, we will use technology to develop their critical thinking, collaborative skills, communication and creativity not just in our computing lessons, but throughout the curriculum. We want our pupils to understand that there is always a choice with using technology and as a school we utilise technology to model positive use. We recognise that the best prevention for a lot of issues we currently see with technology/social media is through education.  

Our knowledge rich curriculum has to be balanced with the opportunity for pupils to apply their knowledge creatively which will in turn help our pupils become skilful computer scientists.  

We encourage staff to try and embed computing across the whole curriculum to make learning creative and accessible. To ensure that our pupils receive the highest level of Computing and ICT education, we are teaching the latest National Curriculum guidelines.  

Along the National Curriculum guidelines, The Pilgrim School follows NCCE scheme from year 1 to year 6 and resources provided by LGfL/TRUSTNet, while our foundation stage utilises ‘Switched On Computing’ scheme.

IMPLEMENTATION

The subject of Computing is taught by class teachers in FS, year 1 and year 2 classes both as an elite subject and embedded in cross-curricular activities.  

KS2 Computing is taught by the Computing coordinator (each class has a weekly session of 1 hour). The Computing coordinator liaises with class teachers to decide how can Computing be taught across the curriculum. Where possible, Computing is often linked to the main topics being covered in subjects like History and Geography. 

The subject of Computing is assessed by our Pilgrim Progress for Computing. Throughout the Computing lessons, teacher records children’s prior knowledge using the specially designed spread sheets. 

We will endeavour to provide numerous opportunities to use available technology both at school and at home to all year groups. This will be done by accessing cloud solutions included in our annual subscription Just2Easy and Busy Things. 

The school’s subscription to G-Suite Apps (Google Workspace) enhances the use of technology across the curriculum and enables extending pupil’s learning at home. What’s more, the use of Google Workspace improves collaboration on a variety of topics across the school and the MAT. All KS2 pupils have their own Google Workspace accounts which are monitored by class teachers as well as the Computing coordinator.

IMPACT

The Computing coordinator has got access to the computing assessments and evidence provided by pupils and teachers. As most of pupils’ work is stored online (e.g. Just2Easy, BUSY THINGS, Google Workspace), the progress achieved across the year groups can be easily monitored and analysed.

We believe that by the end of the Pilgrim Computing Journey at the end of year 6, our pupils will have had abundance of computing experience by using the range of technology effectively and safely. We also hope that our pupils will have developed resilience and ability to deal with all the daily challenges that technology can throw at us either in their future studies or when applying for their future jobs. 

KS1 Links

• J2E Infant Tools - This KS1 online infant toolkit includes the following features: word processing, animation, graphing, painting, pictogram and turtle control. 
• The tools on this website relate to Digital Literacy and Computer Science.

Busy Things - This KS1 resource has a range of interactive games that relate to all three strands of the National Curriculum.

KS2 Links

• Google for Education - This KS2 resource has a combination of creative tools (Google drive, Google Docs, Google Slides, Google Sheets, Google Forms) related to Information Technology and Digital Literacy.
• Just2Easy - This KS2 resource has a collection of online educational tools to engage, motive and inspire children. It can be used to create, edit, style, save, share, publish, blog, vote and review. 
•  Text, graphics, animations, sounds, videos and embedded objects are just a few of the tools related to Digital Literacy and Computer Science..
• Scratch - This is an online resource that allows children to imagine, program and share. It is a free website where children can create their own interactive stories, games and animations. 
• As this tool is good for teaching children coding it relates mainly to Computer Science. 

Online Safety by Our Pupils