Curriculum
Please download the PDF attachment to find out all about our pedagogical beliefs, our curriculum intent and its design and implementation.
Download: Curriculum and Pedagogy 2024-25
Our Curriculum
In line with our vision, our aim for the curriculum is for it to create aspirational learners who can confidently engage in subject specific thinking. We aim to achieve this by creating knowledgeable learners. Knowledgeable learners are able to hook back to prior knowledge that is stored in long term memory and develop links to new schema. A schema is an interconnected web of knowledge that resides in our long-term memory. As you encounter new knowledge, it will connect with an existing schema and so the schema becomes bigger. The bigger the schema becomes, the easier it is to retrieve from the long term to the working memory. Creating these schemas allows learners to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with less effort meaning they then have the capacity to engage in subject specific thinking lessons which develops and advances their disciplinary knowledge and in turn raises their aspirations. This is what happens as we move from a novice to an expert.
Links to activate schema
To achieve this curriculum intent, we have designed a ‘Connected Curriculum’ that has the acquisition of knowledge at its centre. The curriculum design has been influenced by key concepts within each subject. We revisit these concepts throughout the primary phase to allow children to make connections and links to previous learning and build conceptual understanding within the subject discipline. These concepts for each subject are outlined in greater detail in their own subject handbook.
For maximum impact, we have designed a curriculum that also utilises links across subjects to ensure there is maximum opportunity for knowledge obtained to be recalled and new learning to be built on existing schema. Teachers know what learning (from across all areas of the curriculum) has come before and what learning will come after, enabling them to utilise the knowledge that is in the children’s long-term memory.
Drivers
To enable the realisation of our intent, there are three main global themes that drive aspiration and provide further opportunities to connect the curriculum. These themes reoccur across year groups and in and across all subject areas. This means the children can link between their current, previous and future learning and become experts within these global issues. These drivers are;
Units of work
For each subject we have created units of work that carefully map out the substantive knowledge that we want the children to learn. These knowledge organisers inform the teacher of relevant knowledge the children already know and what new knowledge the children must obtain by the end of the unit in order to engage with subject specific thinking. On these organisers we have also made direct and explicit links to other subjects to support and reinforce new learning.
Each subject also has its own associated disciplinary knowledge mapped out. It specifies the disciplinary knowledge that children should know in order to behave as a subject specialist and how this knowledge can be applied within the unit of work.
Within these units we have also made links to our character and outdoor education programmes, which both focus on the personal development. More information on these programmes can be found in personal development handbook.
Example of Unit Planning
For more information specific to subject please click on the links below:
Download: Example of Knowledge Map