Curriculum

At Garswood Primary we strive to provide a well sequenced curriculum and ensure children experience a broad, balanced and enriched learning experience.

We follow the National Curriculum 2014 which was made statutory from September 2014.  At Garswood we have embraced this opportunity to use this starting point from which to develop programs of study to reflect the sequenced learning intentions.  

Check out the curriculum for each year group on the tabs above and if you require any further information then please contact the school.

Process of developing our curriculum

At the start of our journey we met as a staff and governor team and discussed and developed our overarching vision for our children in the areas of the curriculum.

We started with consideration of statements such as ‘becoming a historian; becoming a geographer, becoming an artist’ etc. and thinking of what we wanted for our children by the time they left our school. 

We then reflected on this in terms of the statutory national curriculum and in terms of some of our fundamental principles for instance - ‘becoming inclusive, becoming reflective…’

From this we began to shape our curriculum. 

We know our intent in the curriculum as a whole is to provide children with a rich array of opportunity to learn a deep body of knowledge – in doing so learn vocabulary to support thinking in all curriculum areas, to both support the acquisition and retention of knowledge and thereby addressing social justice issues and giving all children the best opportunities.

Then we began to look at progress and what that meant – in terms of the knowledge and vocabulary and the systematic delivery of a range of ideas and concepts.

In doing this together as a staff team it was to be assured there was clarity in our collective vision. This took a number of months as we unpicked every curriculum area and had detailed, in depth discussions around when and why something would be taught.

As we begun to develop the curriculum we discussed the schemata and the interconnected nature of learning – how pupils learn and hold knowledge in their long term memory. Progression was considered in terms of ‘knowing more and remembering more’ and we considered how the curriculum will be mapped out to allow children to learn and in doing so ‘make a change to their long term memory’.

We recognise that progress – is to know more and remember more. Knowledge should be retained over time and the curriculum needs to give clarity on what knowledge is important. Knowledge and language are interlinked and there is a causal link between vocabulary size and academic success. Therefore, we recognised it was important to consider both the language and the knowledge in our rich, substantive curriculum. 

We also knew we needed to ensure children have the background knowledge to support and prepare them for future learning. The importance of vocabulary in the ideas and concepts and the interconnected webs of learning and the importance of selecting powerful knowledge. Knowledge that is carefully chosen because it is allows for transferrable concepts and ideas allowing children to make connections and compare and contrast.

It is from this process that the curriculum maps were developed. The overview of the maps can be found on the website. These are simply a brief outline as we further develop our website over time. The documents in school identify the key learning end points per half term and some important facts to know along with some of the vocabulary we expect the children to learn. There has been extensive work on how each aspect links with previous learning to allow for revisiting key learning and providing learners with the chance to hook new learning onto previously learned concepts.

We believe we have developed a curriculum that has powerful knowledge, transferable knowledge and that the knowledge has been carefully sequenced.

We continue to keep the curriculum under review recognising the powerful impact that the curriculum has on our children, on their future and the future of the wider society.

Though the curriculum maps can be found below - we can provide further detail on our curriculum on request.

We are committed to ensuring our curriculum is compliant with the duties in the Equality Act 2010 and the Special Educational Needs and Disability Regulations 2014, making the curriculum accessible to all pupils.