Our Courageous and Contagious Curriculum

Curriculum Overview

Our Curriculum Intent:

To deliver a Contagious and Courageous Curriculum. 

This means: to create opportunities for curiosity and creativity and provide an inspiring, motivating curriculum with knowledge rich experiences that also develop disciplinary skills and skills for life.

Contagious -  a curriculum which is exciting, motivating and alive with opportunities and experiences, where each child is passionate about their leaning journey and is willing to ask questions and share their ideas with others. Lighting fires in children’s minds, not just filling buckets.

Courageous - being brave and making mistakes, taking risks and sometimes feeling like it’s just too hard. It is facing challenges not just academically but physically when undertaking adventurous learning. It is our children developing the resilience to persevere and push through mistakes and become successful learners.

Our Curriculum Implementation:

This is facilitated through the Cornerstones framework that has been adapted designed and developed specifically for OUR children in OUR context which results in a carefully sequenced learning journey that builds step-by-step on previous learning whilst enabling retention through linking learning across year groups and subjects, horizontally and vertically.

Cornerstones – the driver for design and sequencing that has been specifically re-worked so that it is contextually relevant for OUR children and their requirements taking advantage of the strengths of our previous curriculum. It will ensure consistency and quality so that teachers have high quality resources so they can focus on delivery in their classroom, knowing the children they teach.

All teaching and learning is underpinned by excellent first teaching and is based upon our Teaching for Learning policy (see our Teaching For Learning policy at the bottom of the page) which is grounded in current, accessible research and best practice and was written alongside the staff CPD programme. 

The overarching implementation is based on 10 Big Ideas that are running strands and themes throughout the curriculum, from nursery to Year 6. The Big Ideas are Humankind, Processes, Creativity, Investigation, Materials, Nature, Place and Space, Comparison, Significance and Change. Documentation and definitions of these can be found on the 'Parent Curriculum Hub'.  

From this, units of learning are delivered in four stages – engage, develop, innovate and express. Here, there are opportunities to have memorable experiences, retrieve related knowledge and skills, deepen and further this, ask questions and have opportunities for oration and to be creative and innovative.

The curriculum overviews can be found here or through the links at the bottom of the page. 

Every minute of every lesson is built on the foundation of our school values – friendship, respect, excellence, determination, love, equality, responsibility, trust - and the Characteristics of Effective Learning to leave a lasting impact.

Our Curriculum Impact:

The curriculum ensures that our children leave The Disraeli School having achieved Our School Aims after making exceptional progress year-on-year.

​​​​​​​After experiencing our Courageous and Contagious Curriculum, children will have accumulated interconnected webs of knowledge and skills that they will draw on to confidently tackle new ideas and concepts, whilst facing challenges excitedly knowing that they “can’t do it…..yet”.

When children leave Disraeli, they will be curious about the world around them and will continue to ask questions to further their knowledge and understanding.

They will be critical thinkers who are well prepared for the world around them and will tackle all challenges, academic or non-academic, by drawing on their deep understanding of our values and applying these to their everyday lives. 

Through all of this, our children will be resilient, independent and confident young people, determined to do their best and to make a positive contribution to the community whilst having a love of learning that prepares them for the next step of their education and helps them to become life-long learners who are aspirational for their futures.

 Teaching for learning policy

 Parent Curriculum Hub

Parents can access year group coverage overviews, knowledge organisers, home resources and end -point assessment documents; all of these show exactly what children will be learning in each subject, each term on our Parent Curriculum Hub. Due to copyright restrictions this is not open-access to the public, however, parents can access the link through the weekly school newsletter.

More information on the Parent Curriculum Hub is located here​​​​​​​.

Curriculum subject links