The curriculum

Our children benefit from an exciting and engaging curriculum which has been developed to ensure that learning is irresistible for children. We ensure learning includes memorable experiences, is sequenced in a logical and progressive way, and is built upon a range of high quality texts. We share the purpose of learning and provide an audience for the children’s outcomes wherever possible.

‘An inspirational curriculum‘ is at the heart of our Underpinning Principles. Teachers plan for a curriculum that inspires, motivates and engages all children in memorable experiences. Connections are made between subject areas to ensure learning contexts are authentic and meaningful and provide opportunities for application of skills, investigation and purposeful play. “It’s not what you do but the way that you do it.” Careful consideration is given to the intent, implementation and impact of all learning sequences. Read more >

Our four school sites are situated in and around small market towns in the largely rural county of Wiltshire. Each site has a unique local context and differing demographics. Our curriculum recognises our location in South West England and ensures knowledge and understanding of the deep history and varied geography that permeates the region, from the expanses of Salisbury Plain to the rich urban cities of Bath and Bristol.

The curriculum is inclusive, ensuring good progress and attainment for every child. Appropriate scaffolding enables children to succeed, both in the classroom and through additional learning support. The success of chidren on the SEN Register is monitored across the curriculum, through Inclusion Coordinator and Headteacher-led Pupil Progress Reviews and SEN surgeries. Curriculum design is intentionally ambitious for all children, including disadvantaged learners. Teachers recognise that the strength of the curriculum is only as good as the progress of our most vulnerable children.

Equality and diversity are woven through our curriculum, ensuring it represents all cultures and backgrounds and that children develop their knowledge and thinking as global citizens. Teaching opportunities are carefully planned and plotted across each topic and subject, in each year group. Children are taught about significant figures, who are carefully selected to ensure they are presented with a diverse range of people.

Closely following the National Curriculum, our teachers are provided with the framework of an ambitious, coherently planned curriculum that is sequenced to ensure cumulative knowledge and skills. This includes a developing vocabulary progression to ensure children can use more words to support their learning. This in turn ensures that children develop a depth of knowledge which enables them to apply their thinking and, in the longer term, remember the content they have been taught and connect new learning with existing knowledge.

Subject leaders and teachers think about the curriculum at three levels.

The first is the intended curriculum – the knowledge and skills that we deem essential for our children to leave our schools with at the end of Year 6. This is set out meticulously by the Curriculum Team, made up of Senior Leaders from across the Trust. Subject Teams then have the responsibility to ensure depth and quality of knowledge and understanding for their subject. They are the ‘experts’ in their subject, advocate, understand and measure the impact on children’s learning and support the development of teachers’ subject knowledge.

The next level is the implemented curriculum – resources that teachers use to deliver teaching sequences. Core approaches include schemes of work such as Read Write Inc (phonics), the use of knowledge organisers, and the teaching and learning of key vocabulary.  Lessons and resources are carefully created for each year group, with consideration of what has been taught before, what will follow, and any gaps accrued due to the pandemic.

The third level is the enacted curriculum, where our teachers bring the curriculum to life in a way that is meaningful, bespoke to the children they know so well, and responsive to both formative and summative assessment. Teachers make refined decisions about what is fundamental for their children’s progress, based on knowledge of what they currently know, understand, and can do  – always mindful of the expected outcome. They plan sequences of learning to address key concepts, typical misconceptions, and the most compelling routes / sequences to enable mastery.

Our Curriculum Mapping, combining carefully selected topics with singular subject delivery, ensures that learning has a meaningful context, with rich opportunities that link to and build upon previous learning to enable children to develop transferable knowledge and skills.

In Early Years (Nursery / Reception), we plan for children to have rich experiences in all the areas of learning. Teachers ensure the environment, interactions, and routines are of a consistent high quality, to support the children’s progress towards independence and to enable them to be successful in the next stage of their education.

Our approach to the curriculum has been created jointly by our schools within the context of our Trust’s development over time. As our Trust grows, we will seek to explore synergies and strengths that individual schools bring to ensure continual development and improvement. The commonality and alignment of our current approach enables high quality joint training and professional learning opportunities and has been proven to reduce workload for our staff. However, where schools have a particular context or successful strategy for curriculum delivery, we are happy to support that.

Ensuring the impact of our curriculum on the children is crucial, in terms of progress and attainment as well as building their confidence and understanding of the world to enable them to participate fully in all the opportunities they may be presented with in life. In order to understand what children know, remember, and can do from the taught curriculum we undertake regular reviews and a range of monitoring and evaluation activities.

Specific information about what is taught in our schools each term can be found on the Class pages of each of our schools’ websites.

The aim of our curriculum is to develop:

• Avid and fluent readers
• Ambitious and curious learners
• Confident writers
• Problem solvers
• Effective citizens who nurture and support others

We do this by providing our children with:

• An Early Years curriculum that launches children’s curiosity and provides the foundations for future learning
• Knowledge that interconnects and is closely linked to the area we live in
• Quality first teaching, with equity for all at its heart
• A rich variety of memorable experiences, that challenge
• Access to an immersive reading spine, that will nurture a lifelong love of reading and literature
• Opportunities to write across a wide range of meaningful contexts
• Learning and challenges that create fluent mathematicians who can reason and solve problems
• Exposure to, and understanding of, the Arts, fostering a love and appreciation of the Arts in all forms
• The chance to be leaders, and become fluent and articulate speakers
• Experiences that make them inquisitive, fostering curiosity and thirst for scientific and technological discovery
• The opportunity to develop an understanding of how to care for their bodies and minds
• An environment that is inclusive, and celebrates diversity, ensuring representation
• A Charter for Living and Learning, that advocates the rights of the child and enables global citizenship through British Values

To support high quality teaching of all subject disciplines, we use the following approaches:

Our wider curriculum is carefully curated to support the development of the whole child, including:

Alongside our mainstream curriculum, we are mindful of and give consideration to:

Our assessment is through key approaches, including:

We measure the effectiveness of our curriculum by checking:

These checks are done through: