We spoke to Rebekah Howe, director of primary education at the Shared Learning Trust, about the curriculum in their 3 primary schools.
What's the approach?
All schools share:
- A broad curriculum:
- This includes curriculum coverage - the trust wants each school to have specialist teaching in the arts and PE, and doesn't want a limited curriculum that 'just suits the SATs'
- There's flexibility in curriculum delivery (see below)
- Approach to marking, which involves:
- Stickers to set out the learning objective in a child's book, then colour coded markers for whether they've met it
- Colour-coded stickers for if the child did this independently, guided or 1-2-1, to monitor their resilience
- Conferencing, where the teacher talks to the child about their work and their next steps
One school runs a 'concentric' curriculum model that focuses on different subjects at different points of the year rather than covering them every week (with the exception of English and maths). Pupils study