Our curriculum is our unique offer to our children; it is our tool by which we raise achievement and enhance personal development. Our overarching aim is for our children to develop the strongest foundations through their educational experience within our Green Lane community to enable all children to fly both academically and socially. (‘Roots to Grow, Wings to Fly)

Our curriculum has been carefully designed to meet the demands of the national curriculum, as well as take in to account the context of our community through our curriculum drivers and build upon our children’s cultural capital with the aim of developing the powerful knowledge needed to be successful citizens. Embedded through our curriculum is our responsibility for the growth of the ‘whole child’. We strive to ensure that our children understand that education is the key to unlocking a world of success and opportunity, whilst understanding what it means to be a good human.

We offer a coherently planned, mastery curriculum, year-on-year building on previously taught knowledge through our threshold concepts as we believe that learning is a change to long term memory which develops through efficient schema building and knowledge retrieval. Our fully inclusive curriculum embraces consistently high expectations for all children to enable them to achieve their full potential.

Alongside the formal curriculum, we aim to embed a culture of wonder and interest in the world. We ensure that current affairs do not go unnoticed. Carefully considered enrichment through visits and visitors enhance our curriculum offer and ensure equality of opportunity. All children can experience life beyond their immediate personal context.

Curriculum champions strive to become expert practitioners who work to drive their subject across the school. All practitioners have strong pedagogical subject knowledge and ensure that intra subject links are explicitly planned and delivered through our threshold concepts.

We aspire for all of our children to leave Green Lane Infant School ready to embark upon the next stage of their education, with aspirations for their future success, the knowledge and skills to embark upon new challenges and with memories that last a lifetime.

We are a research-informed school and have designed our whole curriculum with research and proven best practice at its heart. The curriculum is under constant review as we strive to positively respond to the ever-changing challenges and needs, within our community and wider society. We believe this curriculum provides us with a coherent, progressive and appropriately sequenced curricular structure to enable our pupils to develop subject specific knowledge and skills to prepare them well for the next stages of their education. The curriculum, builds progressively from the learning in the Early Years and is aligned to the National Curriculum whilst also covering our unique school breadth driven by our curriculum drivers; to ensure repetition of key skills and knowledge.

Our curriculum champions have adopted various approaches to the design of their subject area and tailored these to best suit our school and our curriculum intent. We recognise that each subject has specific pedagogy and therefore we have carefully considered which teaching approaches and schemes meet this intent.

We have mapped out the key knowledge, skills and vocabulary for each subject across Early Years and Key Stage One. Our threshold concepts are the fundamental ideas that form the links within our subjects and through topics, which are built upon both within and across year groups and key stages. Planning in this way ensures all children have access to the full curriculum which progresses in skills and knowledge across the year and beyond. Tasks are carefully considered to ensure they Children are given the fundamental opportunity to retrieve prior learning to then build upon this knowledge which strengthens schema storage and retrieval. Our approach is rooted in the belief that learning is invisible in the short term and that sustained mastery takes time.

Oracy underpins our curriculum implementation and pupils are ‘taught to talk’ and ‘learn through talk’ thus developing physical, linguistic, cognitive and social and emotional skills. With both reading and oracy being central to our curriculum implementation, we ensure that vocabulary which enriches knowledge and understanding about the world is taught. We are passionate about reading and story telling and therefore ensure that children have access to the best quality children’s literature and that story-telling and rhyme time are valuable learning experiences within our timetables.

We feel it is so important to inspire the children with a wealth of additional experiences and opportunities. The children need to have the chance to experience new things, to work with those they wouldn’t normally be with, to try things presented to them in a different way. Each year group has at least one trip which is subsidised by the school. We are currently expanding our range of extra- curricular opportunity offer for our children.

Our belief is that nothing is learned unless it rests in our children’s long-term memories. This does not happen and cannot be assessed in the short term. Assessment for us, therefore answers two main questions- how well are our children coping with curriculum content and how well are they retaining previously taught content?

Our greatest tool is formative assessment which has a structured place in all lessons across the curriculum and contributes to adaptive teaching to ensure that no child is left behind. By teaching through concepts, and continually revisiting these throughout Early Years and Key Stage One, our children have a vast number of opportunities to further deepen their understanding in different contexts.

We are currently working with curriculum champions to revise our concept- led progression maps, meaning learning can be evaluated using clear end points.