Curriculum
‘The school has designed a highly ambitious curriculum for all pupils. Leaders have thoughtfully selected the concepts, vocabulary and skills that pupils need to learn. Pupils develop exceptionally detailed knowledge across the curriculum, which they recall with ease.’ Ofsted inspection 2023
Low threshold, high ceiling – this is the guiding principle behind our curriculum.
Every child at our school learns core knowledge, with nothing left to chance, across every area of the National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage . Equally, our curriculum is designed full of opportunities for extension, challenge and deep thinking.
Our curriculum is driven by three values: Achieve Excellence, Love Learning and Belong.
We design our curriculum so that knowledge is deliberately connected within and across subjects, enabling pupils to think deeply, make meaning and experience the joy of learning.
We want every child to leave us with strong foundations in reading, writing and maths, a broad and coherent body of knowledge across subjects, and the confidence and identity to participate fully in learning and in the wider world.
Belong
Pupils feel safe, valued and connected. They build positive relationships, develop a strong sense of self and community, and experience intellectual belonging through language, knowledge and participation.
Love Learning
Pupils are curious, motivated and increasingly independent learners. They learn to approach challenge positively, make connections, persevere, reflect and take pride in improving.
Achieve Excellence
Pupils are supported to succeed academically, socially and emotionally. They are challenged to think deeply, reason carefully and achieve highly across the curriculum.
By the end of primary school, pupils will be:
- Fluent, joyful readers who can comprehend, discuss and enjoy a wide range of texts.
- Clear, confident communicators who listen attentively, speak with purpose, challenge respectfully and use rich vocabulary to explain and connect ideas.
- Capable writers who use the power of words to communicate knowledge, feelings and imagination for different purposes and audiences.
- Confident mathematicians who reason, solve problems and persevere through challenge.
- Curious, knowledgeable learners with secure subject knowledge and memorable experiences across science, humanities, the arts, design and sport.
- Happy, safe and increasingly independent young people who can recognise feelings, regulate behaviour and make positive choices.
- Learners with a sense of intellectual belonging — able to access ambitious ideas, participate in group thinking and contribute confidently.
All of this begins in EYFS which is the foundation
Curriculum principles
We will achieve this through:
- a coherent vertical curriculum with clear end points across the primary phase;
- deliberate connections within and across subjects - “linking thinking”;
- a low threshold, high ceiling approach that includes and challenges all pupils;
- sufficient time for deep learning, retrieval and long-term memory;
- explicit teaching of vocabulary as the foundation for understanding and critical thinking;
- structured development of oracy across the curriculum;
- meaningful enrichment and experiences that deepen understanding and belonging;
- teaching pupils to engage critically and positively with their community and wider world.
We have sequenced learning in each subject so that every child at Eleanor Palmer builds knowledge lesson on lesson, term on term and year on year until they leave us at the end of Year 6. Our Subject Verticals show how this progression of knowledge is planned and how connections are made.
Our topic approach means that classes study one subject-based topic more deeply for a term, building diverse cultural capital and an impressive body of knowledge. Three termly topics are geography-based, history-based or science-based, and include enriching visits and visitors. For example, Year 4 has a history-based topic in the Autumn: Romans in Britain. Our Topic Map gives an overview.
For each topic, we share key concepts and knowledge with the children in knowledge organisers . To ensure the children remember what they have been taught and make connections with prior learning, We aim to make every child’s learning vivid, real, engaging and memorable, providing challenges that encourage their development in all areas.
Our children tell us year after year that this is how they love learning and when they come to visit us as teenagers and young adults (and they frequently do!) we have proof that this approach has fostered life-long learners.
