Our Curriculum
Intent
At Maple Grove Primary School, our children learn through an ambitious, inclusive, engaging curriculum led by our knowledgeable and passionate staff. All children enjoy and have access to a wealth of resources and experiences to enrich their lives, make memories, and foster a life-long love of learning that equips them with the skills and attributes that will allow them to flourish both in school and beyond. Each child is encouraged to reach their full academic and personal potential in our happy, safe and stimulating environment.
Our knowledge-rich curriculum is well-sequenced, progressive, and ambitious. It sparks children’s curiosity and encourages them to develop new skills. It also provides children with exciting educational opportunities that develop them as pupils and adults in later life. Our curriculum is broad and balanced and equips our teachers with the knowledge and resources to enable children to achieve their best.
Knowledge and skills are well-sequenced and progressive, building on previous learning to ensure children have comprehensive subject schemas. Knowledge and abilities are mapped on medium-term plans and built to clearly defined end goals throughout the year.
Our curriculum has deliberately been divided into individual subjects. We made this decision to reduce children’s cognitive load during the week, promote further excitement and engagement in the subject, enable children and staff to fully dedicate themselves to one area of learning for the week, ensure that learning is explicit and clearly defined, and motivate all children to find success and achieve an end goal.
Well-researched curriculum resources support our curriculum; these ensure that the knowledge provided to our teachers and children in our curriculum is ambitious, engaging, rich in cultural capital, well-sequenced and well-resourced.
Our curriculum ensures all children have the essential knowledge, skills and cultural capital to succeed. Our curriculum is ambitious and aims to inspire, engage and encourage children to wonder about their possibilities, whether that is through studying a wide variety of the world’s greatest artists and scientists or through our weekly music lessons, which take inspiration from some of the world’s most iconic pieces of music.
Link to National Curriculum overview
Implementation
Our high-quality plans and resources empower teachers with the subject knowledge they need to feel confident teaching new concepts. They also support their workload and well-being, allowing them to devote more time to their personal pedagogy.
Teachers explicitly teach metacognition in each lesson, checking for children’s prerequisite knowledge and addressing misconceptions at the outset. They encourage children to contemplate utilising and applying their existing knowledge and skills to succeed in the lesson. Teachers model expert practices before children work independently. At the end of each lesson, they prompt children to reflect on what they have learned during the session, how it will influence future learning, and whether they would approach the task differently.
Retrieval practice is integrated at the beginning of every lesson, enabling children to connect with prior learning, find success by understanding what they already know, and see how it will assist them in the present, ensuring that no child is left behind, either through mobility or absences from school.
Individual teachers benefit from coaching, mentoring, networking, and continuing professional development (CPD) to further hone their expertise and support their teaching.
Teacher assessments identify where children excel and how they progress through the curriculum from their starting points. Teachers address any gaps by ensuring children receive manageable individual targets where appropriate.
Floorbooks capture children’s personal learning journeys, interests, insights from awareness weeks, inquiries, learning in PSHE, shared experiences, work on values, and celebrations of trips, visits, guests, and experiences, as well as their successes, voices, and shared identity as a class.
Link to an overview of the year group
Impact
Senior leaders collaborate with team and subject leaders to evaluate the impact of our curriculum through a continuous cycle of monitoring. This includes book looks, lesson visits, learning walks, pupil conversations, teacher conversations, pupil progress meetings, moderation, and our teacher assessment, which identifies children’s targets.
The impact of our curriculum is monitored daily through retrieval practice, ensuring that key knowledge is frequently recalled and applied to various contexts.
Children leave Maple Grove Primary School having reached their potential, acquired new knowledge, developed skills for success in future life, and cultivated a strong sense of their achievements, talents, and abilities. They will also comprehend their moral responsibilities towards themselves and others and their lasting role in our community.