KS1 and KS2 Curriculum

Curriculum and Pedagogy at Crosslee Primary School

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The curriculum outlines the knowledge (semantic and procedural) that children will learn.

The pedagogies are the chosen approaches that we use to teach that best help learning to take place. These include general and subject/content specific pedagogies.

Assessment is the processes we use to find out what pupils have learnt (and retained).

We believe that curriculum design and pedagogy are interdependent… ‘because the real curriculum – sometimes called the ‘enacted’ or ‘achieved’ curriculum – is the lived daily experience of young people in classrooms, curriculum is pedagogy.’ Dylan Wiliam

Evidence-Informed Curriculum Design

Our curriculum design is deeply-rooted in cognitive science research. The curriculum identifies the essential semantic and procedural knowledge that our pupils will learn. Essential knowledge is that which we prioritise for 100% of pupils to know 100% of. Knowledge is carefully sequenced, within and across subjects and year groups, and through each unit of learning, to ensure that it is progressive. This allows schema to build effectively, with new learning building on and connecting to prior knowledge, securing encoding in long-term memory and considering the management of intrinsic cognitive load (J. Sweller, 1998). The sequencing carefully considers the spacing of learning, to facilitate spaced retrieval, based upon the Atkinson-Shiffrin three-stage model of human memory and high utility learning techniques identified in Dunlosky’s Strengthening the Student Toolbox, 2013. Our curriculum identifies essential vocabulary, using a tiered approach (Beck, McKeown, Kucan), with priority given to the teaching of essential vocabulary, embedding of known vocabulary and exposure to aspirational vocabulary.