Our Intent: As a school we follow the Purple Mash scheme of learning. Purple Mash provides opportunities for children in each year group to deepen their understanding of computational concepts as well as time during lessons to apply and extend their knowledge of technology. Purple Mash also have a big focus on ‘Online Safety’ and provide many occasions in both isolated lessons and in topic lessons for children to learn and make links with regards to how they can keep themselves and others safe online.

How do we deliver this programme? Purple Mash focuses on the three areas of the computing curriculum which are; Computer Science, Information Technology and Digital Literacy.

Within each year group Purple Mash have designed a topics of work to ensure that each area is being covered, some topics can be chosen but there are key topics to be taught in every year group which are; Coding (linked to Computer Science), Online Safety (linked to Digital Literacy) and Spreadsheets (Linked to Information Technology). Children will complete 1 hour of computing weekly to build on skills learnt in previous lessons. Some skills learnt can be transferred to other subjects for example, spreadsheets could be used in Maths or Science and learning to write for different audiences can help with all areas of English.

Additional opportunities: As a school, computing is incorporated throughout the curriculum as much as possible and we take full advantage of having enough laptops for a whole class to use them at the same time. Laptops might be used for a variety of activities such as completing research for a project in Geography or History or an online maths website to learn times tables. In English, there are many opportunities to use knowledge learnt from Purple Mash to write up different genres such as letters, emails and non-chronological reports s as well as using the Microsoft suite for word processing. The laptops might also be also used to help children with reading for example to listen to stories aloud online. Each class has access to an iPad/tablet for children to use specific programs which might support their learning or enhance it e.g. using a music or recording program.

	Computing at Cheapside School	[pdf 171KB]
	Computing programmes of study- key stages 1 and 2	[pdf 82KB]