'At Mary Dean's CE Primary School, our computing curriculum equips children with the essential digital skills and fosters a love for technology.'

^{'Every child is a digital citizen'}

'Computing is the future and those who master it will lead the way'- Unknown. 

Our Computing Intent:

At Mary Dean's CE Primary School, our computing curriculum aims to equip children with essential digital literacy skills, foster creativity and inspire a lifelong interest in technology.  By exploring coding, digital communication and online safety, we empower our children to navigate and contribute confidently to the digital world. 

Our computing curriculum links to our school's core values:

Our place in the world: our computing curriculum teaches children how to responsibly and effectively use technology to connect, collaborate and contribute to the global community.  Through exploring digital citizenship, online safety and global communication tools, children learn how to navigate the digital world with respect and awareness, understanding their role in a connected society. 

Our wellbeing: our computing curriculum teaches children how to use technology responsibly and safely.  It includes lessons on digital citizenship, online safety and managing screen time, ensuring children know how to maintain a healthy balance and protect their mental and emotional health in the digital world. 

Our voice: our computing curriculum teaches children how to effectively communicate and express their ideas through digital platforms.  By learning skills like coding, digital storytelling and online collaboration, children gain confidence in sharing their thoughts and contributing to discussions in the digital world, ensuring their voices are heard and valued. 

Our aspirations: our computing curriculum equips children with the skills and confidence to explore and achieve their dreams in a digital age.  Through coding, digital design and problem-solving projects, children are encouraged to think creatively and ambitiously, envisioning themselves and future innovators and leaders in technology. 

Our Computing Implementation:

Our whole curriculum is shaped by our school vision, which aims to enable all children, regardless of background, ability, additional needs, to flourish to become the very best version of themselves they can possibly be. We teach the National Curriculum through the Teach Computing scheme of work, supported by clear skills and knowledge progression. This ensures that skills and knowledge are built year by year and sequenced appropriately to maximise learning for all children. To ensure a broad range of skills and understanding, computing is taught across three main strands: digital literacy, computer science and information technology. As part of information technology, children learn to use and express themselves and develop their ideas through ICT, for example, writing and presenting, as well as exploring art and design using multimedia. Within digital literacy, children develop practical skills in the safe use of ICT and the ability to apply these skills to solving relevant, worthwhile problems, for example, understanding safe use of the internet, networks and email. In computer science, we teach children to understand and apply the fundamental principles and concepts of computer science, including abstraction, logic, algorithms and data representation. Also, to analyse problems into computational terms, and have repeated practical experience of writing computer programs in order to solve such problems. At Mary Dean's, we give children access to a wide range of good quality resources and provide cross-curricular opportunities for children to apply their computing knowledge and skills. Online safety is taught within each computing lesson as well as taught as a unit each year.  It is also explored through our PSHE curriculum. 

We teach and assess the following skills in computing: computer science, information technology and digital literacy. 

Please see our computing pathways, knowledge and skills progression and curriculum documents. 

Our computing impact:

The implementation of this curriculum ensures that when children leave Mary Dean's CE Primary, they are competent and safe users of ICT with an understanding of how technology works. They will have developed skills to express themselves and be creative in using digital media and be equipped to apply their skills in Computing to different challenges going forward.