Curriculum jargon buster

What you want pupils to know and to be able to do. It's not a vision or mission statement

• A long-term plan (such as a curriculum map), showing the knowledge and skills you want pupils to gain at each stage, and by the end of their time at school
• Your rationale for why you've made these choices

• Teaching methods
• Classroom resources
• Sequencing and structure
• Assessment

• Outcomes in externally set assessments
• Pupils' destinations (e.g. further or higher education or employment)
• Conversations with pupils that demonstrate they know, can do, and remember more than they did before

• A broad curriculum focuses on all curriculum subjects (for example art, PE, PSHE) not just core subjects (English, maths and science) 
• A global history curriculum that spans a wide range of time periods and places
• An RE curriculum that covers many religions (beyond Christianity, Islam and Judaism)

• How deeply a pupil understands key concepts (e.g. can they explain the concepts in their own words or teach someone else?)
• How well pupils understand the underlying links between different subjects and ideas

• Properties of materials
• Rules of netball
• Pythagoras' theorem
• Events leading up to the First World War
• Plot of Romeo and Juliet

• How historians come to conclusions and judgements
• Carrying out an experiment
• Writing persuasively

• Displacement and volume theory in maths
• Basic understanding of safety in the home
• World War 2 facts and dates

• An anecdote about a mathematician e.g. Archimedes' bath story
• Telling a personal story to explain the dangers of fire or household risks
• Talking to grandparents about their experience of World War 2 or visiting places that were bombed

• Understanding characteristics of 2D shapes before exploring 3D shapes
• Understanding gravity and friction, to aid understanding that external forces affect the motion of objects

• Introducing a new topic to assess current understanding, teaching unrelated content to allow thinking time, then recalling the new topic again to embed learning
• Splitting humanities over the term rather than blocking weeks, e.g. alternating geography and history lessons within the term rather than having a 'geography term' and then a 'history term'
• Recalling specific learning, e.g. what were we learning about this time yesterday?

• What pupils learn in one lesson is built on in the next
• Pupils learning to write phonetically before being taught irregular spellings
• Learning about Elizabethan London before teaching Shakespeare

• A whole school theme taught at the same time to all year groups e.g. a whole school project on A Midsummer Night's Dream
• Whole school assembly themes 

• New spelling and grammar concepts are introduced year-on-year
• Maths skills and knowledge building on pre-existing maths skills and knowledge

• Skills learned on a specific geography field trip 
• Skills are developed as part of a one-off project, e.g. fundraising for Red Nose Day
• A one-off topic reflecting current events, e.g. teaching the history of the Olympics during the Olympics

• Persuasive writing taught each year, with increasing complexity, e.g. from writing a short letter in year 1 to writing a complex argument in year 6
• The same religious festivals are returned to each year, with increasingly complex knowledge taught each year

• Teaching data handling using a class vote on pupils' favourite sport or food 
• Teaching about the history of the local area or community and how this relates to pupils' lives today (e.g. a project about the Empire Windrush)

• Concepts in maths or science that are unrelated to personal experience
• History that's taught without reference to pupils' modern day lives
• The introduction of concepts beyond pupils' lived experience, e.g. what it's like to live in another country or be from another culture