Curriculum

Curriculum design statement: intent, implementation, impact

 
Intent 
The breadth of our curriculum is designed with three goals in mind: 

1. To give pupils appropriate experiences to develop as confident, responsible citizens; 
2. To provide a rich ‘cultural capital’; 
3. To provide a coherent, structured, academic curriculum that leads to sustained mastery for 
all and a greater depth of understanding for those who are capable. 

1. Appropriate experiences 
We have developed two curriculum drivers that shape our curriculum, bring about the aims 
and Christian values of our school, and respond to the particular needs of our community: 
Values – which helps children to understand faith, respect diversity and build community 
cohesion. 
Possibilities – which helps pupils to build aspirations and know available possibilities for 
their future lives. 

2. Cultural Capital 
Powerful subject knowledge that gives pupils academic and intellectual ways of thinking, 
and powerful personal knowledge that gives them the character, dispositions, attitudes and 
habits to navigate their way through life. 

3. A coherently planned academic curriculum 
Underpinned by the two drivers, our academic curriculum sets out: 
a) A clear list of the breadth of topics that will be covered; 
b) The ‘threshold concepts’ pupils should understand; 
c) Criteria for progression within the threshold concepts; 
d) Criteria for depth of understanding. 

The diagram below shows a model of our curriculum structure:  

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a) The curriculum breadth for each year group ensures each teacher has clarity as to what to 
cover.  As well as providing the key knowledge within subjects it also provides for pupils’ 
growing cultural capital. 
b) Threshold concepts are the key disciplinary aspects of each subject.  They are chosen to 
build conceptual understanding within subjects and are repeated many times in each topic. 
c) Milestones define the standards for the threshold concepts. 
d) Depth: we expect pupils in year 1 of the milestone to develop a Basic (B) understanding of 
the concepts and an Advancing (A) or Deep (D) understanding in year 2 of the milestone.  
Phase one (years 1,3 and 5) in a milestone is the knowledge building phases that provides 
the fundamental foundations for later application. LEARNING AT THIS STAGE MUST NOT BE 
RUSHED and will involve a high degree of repetition so that knowledge enters pupils’ long
term memory.  If all the core knowledge is acquired quickly, teachers create extended 
knowledge. 

Sustained mastery 
Nothing is learned unless it rests in pupils’ long-term memories.  This does not happen, and cannot 
be assessed, in the short term.  Assessment, therefore answers two main questions: ‘How well are 
pupils coping with curriculum content?’ and ‘How well are they retaining previously taught content?’ 

Implementation 

Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principle underpin it: 
1) Learning is most effective with spaced repetition 
2) Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention. 
3) Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular, which increases both storage 
and retrieval strength. 
In addition to the three principles we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term and 
that sustained mastery takes time. 
Some of our content is subject specific, whilst other content is combined in a cross-curricular 
approach.  Continuous provision, in the form of daily routines, replaces the teaching of some aspects of the curriculum and, in other cases, provides retrieval practise for previously learned content. 

Impact 
The impact of our curriculum is that by the end of each Milestone, the vast majority of pupils have 
sustained mastery of the content, that is, they remember it all and are fluent in it: Some children 
have a greater depth of understanding.  We track carefully to ensure pupils are on track to reach the expectations of our curriculum.