Our curriculum framework, underpinned by current research and statutory documentation (such as the National Curriculum and EYFS framework), ensures our children will be well-rounded individuals who are prepared for the next stage of their journey. It will promote compassion, mutual understanding, integrity and a pursuit of excellence in order for our children to reach their potential and make a positive contribution to the wider world. Our enquiry-based approach takes children on a journey of memorable learning through rich and purposeful experiences, culminating in authentic outcomes which leave a social legacy.

Fluency in the core subjects, with reading at the heart, enables access to the full curriculum and is therefore integral to our approach. The curriculum is carefully designed through enquiry drivers (for example: History, Geography and The Arts), enhancers and discrete subjects, ensuring coverage, progression and retention of knowledge and skills.

Our knowledge-rich curriculum is underpinned by key concepts. Children explore concepts throughout the curriculum, revisiting them in a wide range of contexts and through the lens of different subjects. This promotes a deep understanding of the concepts and enables the transfer of knowledge to the long-term memory. It aims to provide inclusive and aspirational environments where learners thrive and build the cultural capital they need to make aspirational choices about their own future, overcoming any barriers.

Our Curriculum Concepts at Rivendell

Our curriculum content choices ensure that knowledge is progressive, and our curriculum has strong cohesion between subjects and between year groups. Content choices are revisited multiple times throughout a child’s journey through our school curriculum to enable children to build on prior learning and build interconnected webs of knowledge – schema.

Concepts also help to add cohesion to our curriculum at Rivendell Flying High Academy. They allow children to make links between learning in different subjects and across different year groups.

A concept is:

‘A concept is a mental representation of knowledge or things with important commonalities, grouped together to help us organise, retrieve and understand information about our complex world.’

Three umbrella concepts run through our curriculum from EYFS to Year 6 to promote a coherence of knowledge throughout the curriculum and develop diagonal links throughout our curriculum. These diagonal links run between year groups and between subjects to add coherence and deepen the children’s knowledge and learning.

The three umbrella concepts are:

• Community
• Significance
• Cause and Effect

Two concepts are substantive in nature (community, significance) and one is disciplinary (cause and effect). This ensures a balance between developing interconnected factual knowledge and practices of subjects.

The more times the children revisit the concepts and associated knowledge, the stronger the schema becomes.