Curriculum

Our Curriculum Overview

Basic Principles

1. Our curriculum places ‘Powerful Knowledge’ – knowledge that takes pupils beyond their own experiences – at the heart of the primary curriculum.
2. Learning is a change to long-term memory.
3. Our pupils experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge.
4. Our curriculum is underpinned by the development of strong emotional and social skills. Positive interactions and good relationships within our learning community form the foundation of positive conditions for learning.

What we learn: curriculum content

Our curriculum is knowledge rich. It has been designed to ensure that our pupils are taught the content of the EYFS framework and the National Curriculum. The content of our curriculum focuses on core concepts for NC subject disciplines and we use materials from the Knowledge Schools Trust Primary Knowledge Curriculum and other high quality schemes which we adapt to a cohesive whole. Subjects are taught discretely and we make interdisciplinary links between them to strengthen schema where relevant and appropriate.

Opportunities are planned across the curriculum to enable pupils to apply and connect knowledge, skills and understanding. This starts in the early years, where we have taken the EYFS framework and carefully planned a sequential and progressive learning journey that connects to the Key Stage 1 and 2 Curriculum.

We aim to deliver high quality instruction using evidence from cognitive science to support strong teaching. For example, opportunities for retrieval practice and repetition so that pupils learn and remember more over their time with us.

Our curriculum is ambitious in its aim and includes three key drivers:

• language & vocabulary acquisition;
• aspiration;
• cultural awareness building.

This means that everything we do within our curriculum is shaped by these three aspects. We call this The BIG Picture.

British Values (BV) and spiritual, moral, social and cultural development (SMSC) underpin our curriculum. Click here to see how we encompass these at Atlas Academy.