Curriculum

Our school recognises every child as a unique individual, celebrating and welcoming differences within our inclusive school community.

Our curriculum is designed to build resilience and respect, enabling our children to become creative and critical thinkers with well-developed interpersonal skills who understand how they learn. We recognise and build on each child’s prior learning and provide a wealth of first-hand experiences and enhancement opportunities to engage them. Learning opportunities available throughout our communities and surrounding areas are used and woven into our curriculum. We firmly believe childhood should be a happy, investigative and enquiring time where there are no limits to curiosity and there is a thirst for knowledge.

In our opinion, play and playfulness are part of life and any education that does not communicate joy, wonder, amazement, fascination and delight has failed. In the Bible it says, ‘Joy in learning is the mark of a good teacher and well-taught pupil’ (Proverbs 8: 30-31).

Children leave our school with a sense of community belonging and the confidence and skills to make decisions, self-evaluate, make connections and become lifelong learners.

At Sharnford, in our hub, and across our IPAT trust of schools, we follow the CUSP curriculum for English, Geography, History, Science, Dt, Art, Music and MFL. 

CUSP is designed to be:

• Connected
• Cumulative
• Coherent

CUSP is underpinned by evidence, research and cognitive science with modules of learning that are deliberately sequenced to activate prior learning, build on skills, deepen knowledge, deepen understanding to enable robust progression.

There is an emphasis on oracy and vocabulary acquisition, retention and use to break down learning barriers and accelerate progress. A rich diet of language and vocabulary is deliberately planned for across all CUSP subjects.

Specific skills are discreetly taught and practised so they become transferrable as learning, vocabulary and content is cumulative; content is learned, retrieve and built upon.

As a Church School, we also have RE as a core subject, using Understanding Christianity and the Leicestershire Diocese scheme of work throughout. We use White Rose maths to ensure robust mixed age teaching, SCARF for our PSHE lessons and KAPOW for computing.

We are also moving towards greater sustainability. This doesn’t just cover our environmental impact, or the awareness in our pupils of their future obligations to our world. It also includes having a curriculum approach that can be maintained and exploited to the highest standards, all while keeping stakeholder wellbeing and participation at its core.

More details about our curriculum can be found in the curriculum maps below as well as through clicking on the subject specific icons. In addition, class teachers send out curriculum newsletters at the start of each term.