Curriculum Overview

Intent Statement

At Grove Road, our curriculum combines ambition and breadth and puts the children at the centre of our school. Our vision is to create a school that provides an inspiring education, in a happy, safe and secure environment where all children can achieve their full potential in order to succeed in our ever changing world. We want to help each child become resilient, confident and curious young people who have a passion for learning and achieving.

Our ambitious curriculum has been designed to take account of the legal requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage Curriculum and the Primary National Curriculum. Our curriculum is constantly evolving to ensure the offer for every child is well sequenced and builds on prior learning as well as responding to the needs of learners and their interests by enhancing their learning experiences and raising awareness from the local area to national and global arenas. Therefore, we intend to develop outward looking pupils who are able to engage in learning about themselves and have an understanding of the wider world and its diverse cultures. We aim to expose our children to enriching experiences,immersing them in progressive knowledge and skills; equipping them with personal characteristics required to succeed in life.

At Grove Road we believe that teaching should:

• Convey knowledge and model transferable skills
• Outline the relevance of the learning to the real world and establish links with previous learning across the curriculum
• Provide challenging, thought provoking questions to stimulate thinking
• Provide opportunities for pupils to discuss and explain their learning in a mixture of groupings
• Guide pupils in their steps towards being successful
• Provide time for pupils to use and apply their skills to their work (self-checking against the Steps to Success / Success Criteria when appropriate)
• Model the learning and improvement process
• Provide opportunities for self and peer assessment
• Summarise learning, providing an allocated time for reflection on the next steps and opportunity to apply these improvements.

We believe that children learn best when learning is:

• Stimulating
• Challenging
• Creative
• Well sequenced
• Fun
• Varied
• Practical
• Supported
• Progressive
• Cross curricular
• Reflective
• Interactive
• Enjoyable
• Purposeful and relevant
• Builds on prior experience.

Implementation

Our learning is underpinned by the National Curriculum (2014) and the core elements of Literacy, Mathematics and Science follow national frameworks, but we enhance these to create an exciting and meaningful context for children to explore the world through learning designed to meet the needs of each year group.

Through careful curriculum planning, learning across the foundation subjects is arranged to allow as many opportunities for cross-curricular learning as possible. This provides children with a chance to not only learn the rigours and discipline associated with each subject but enables them to make links and connections between knowledge and skills. This approach helps bring greater context to information and leads to better lifelong learning and critical thinking skills.

To ensure breadth, balance and progression, curriculum content and core knowledge is carefully mapped across each Key Stage and monitored by dedicated subject leaders. As an academy we are in the fortunate position of being able to adapt our curriculum to meet the needs of our students. This means our curriculum has the scope to be reviewed and evolve as necessary to ensure the children at Grove always benefit from the best possible practice in education. 

Our nursery and foundation stage are a source of great pride as they provide excellent and adaptive learning experiences for all the children in the early years based on the revised statutory framework for EYFS and high quality, enthusiastic teaching. 

On our website you will find information about how each subject is taught and details about how coverage and progression are mapped across the age phases in line with the themes for that year group. 

If you would like to know more about our curriculum or would like to learn more about your child’s learning please don’t hesitate to contact us.