Curriculum

Curriculum Intent

At Greenside Primary School we believe that our curriculum should offer children not only the National Curriculum but life skills and experiences beyond this. As a one and a half form entry school, we have mixed classes in all phases except for early years. As a result, our curriculum has been carefully designed to work over a 2-year cycle incorporating all key national curriculum objectives across the 2 years. The only exception to this is maths, which is taught discretely in year groups. 

Alongside teaching the requirements of the national curriculum, key drivers have been identified. We have prioritised the key skills and aspirations we want our children to experience and develop during their time with us. We use these 'drivers' to underpin the learning and experiences we undertake in all areas of school life and to ensure our curriculum offer is enriched.  These key drivers are personal to our school and reflect the social and educational needs of our local area. The following key drivers underpin our learning and are developed through the school.  Our five key drivers for our school curriculum are:

Resilience

Learning is not always straightforward and does not always produce immediate results or success. Teaching children this fact, and supporting them to use it to their advantage, engenders confidence and tenacity, and can and must be taught. This is achieved through modelling of making mistakes; a learning process that includes editing, refining and changing; a strong focus on problem-solving and a metacognitive approach that develops self-reflection. The broadest sense of purpose in this teaching is for children to become life-long learners, able to persevere in adverse situations and ‘bounce back’ after a set-back in any area of their adult life.

Aspiration

Aspiration is the hope, desire or ambition to strive to achieve something.  At Greenside we aim for all our children to be the best they can possibly be and to challenge themselves as learners. The development of aspirations encourages children to produce work of high quality, take pride in themselves and everything they do. At Greenside we aim for all our pupils to move onto the next stage of their learning with key life skills to enable them to succeed. We aim to inspire our pupils by embedding inspirational individuals into our curriculum as well as provide opportunities to develop creativity and practical skills through enterprise.

Diversity

Our school diversity priorities focus on gender, religion, ethnicity, ability and inclusion for all. While some subjects, such as Religious Education, provide specific opportunities for diversity to be celebrated, other areas must be sought out. For this reason, in all subjects where influential people are celebrated and studied, careful consideration has been made to include persons from a diverse range of backgrounds as possible, including where it challenges cultural stereotypes. In the books that are studied in English, we cross reference to ensure that there is a celebration of diversity, that a range of cultural backgrounds are represented and that our strong lead characters include those that do not conform to stereotypes.

Community

Responding to the needs of the community in which we serve is an important part of the Greenside curriculum. Embedding children with a strong sense of their local community, through links with community projects, businesses and inspiring local individuals drives much of our curriculum. This  encompasses our belief that children should understand their role in both local and global issues. This includes not only an understanding of the headline issues, but as the children get older, the wider contexts and grassroots issues that lead to those headlines. We foster opportunities for children to take the lead in local initiatives in ways such as campaigning, fundraising and small-scale practical engagement.

Creativity

We want our pupils to engage and express their ideas in a variety of creative forms.  Through teaching creative approaches, we will give the children opportunities to be imaginative, use experiences and observations to make connections in the learning and appreciate that learning can be accomplished in different forms. Our curriculum celebrates the arts, music and performance by cultivating opportunities throughout the year.

Please find below our Long Term Plans detailing each subject in the school curriculum for each academic year. The Long Term Plans have been split into phase groups as, due to split classes, we plan and teach the curriculum on a two year rolling cycle (with the exception of our early years).

You may notice that some information is incomplete for the 2023-24 cycle. School staff are currently in the process of rebuilding the curriculum ready for next years cycle. Watch this space!