Curriculum

Greengate Lane’s Knowledge Rich Curriculum

“Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.” John Dewey

At Greengate Lane Academy we expect the highest aspirations for our pupils. We want all children to learn and make academic progress no matter their starting points. We have a clear vision for what we want pupils to achieve during their time at Greengate Lane and have designed our curriculum to give all pupils the knowledge, skills and understanding they will need in their future years.

The Big Picture

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

language & vocabulary acquisition;
knowledge acquisition;
aspiration;

Our Curriculum Overview

Basic Principles

Our curriculum places ‘Powerful Knowledge’ – knowledge that takes pupils beyond their own experiences – at the heart of the primary curriculum.
Learning is a change to long-term memory.
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.
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 KS 1/2 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.