We are very proud of our ambitious Abbey Hill Curriculum

An Ambitious Abbey Hill Curriculum:

There is no ceiling to what our AbbeyHillians can achieve as they grow and get better from where their learning journey begins.

The design of our curriculum

The Abbey Hill Primary Curriculum has been designed to support our pupils to learn through 4 key lenses: Power and Peace, Imagination and Innovation, What a Wonderful World and Equity and Diversity.

The 4 lenses reflect key priority foci for our catchment both in terms of the key knowledge and understanding we aspire to our pupils attaining but also in the concepts, skills, attitudes and experiences that are central to our ambitions for our pupils.

The structure of our curriculum

The Abbey Hill Primary Curriculum follows a rolling-program due to the mixed-year group nature of our class structures. Our curriculum has been carefully planned to retain its progressive sequencing. Over the course of a rolling program, pupils continue to cover the full content of the national curriculum with breadth and balance. This will be reviewed in July 2025.

Why have we chosen this approach?

Our lenses reflect our intent as a school. They enable us to focus in, very carefully, on the key takeaways we feel our pupils will most benefit from, in covering the National Curriculum (and beyond).

The role of knowledge in our curriculum

A curriculum in which we know more and remember more.

The substantive knowledge we aspire for our pupils to attain has been carefully selected having drawn upon the National Curriculum, external advice and support, expert knowledge of leaders in school, pupil voice and our knowledge of the needs and experiences of the community we serve.

Knowledge selected is cohesive; all 4 lenses demonstrate a clear pathway of sequential progression with the knowledge attained forming the foundation on which to build in subsequent years.

The ‘teaching’ of our curriculum, including knowledge, is research and evidence-informed. At Abbey Hill, our teachers are a community of practitioners invested in professional development. All staff give careful consideration to cognitive load and adaptation to ensure the planning and delivery of our curriculum enables all of our pupils to thrive. Principles of retrieval practice and small-steps, sequential learning, inform the decisions teachers make to ensure that our pupils know more and remember more.

Our Curriculum Lens Model

What do we mean by ‘lenses?

Lenses are the concepts through which our learning projects are studied. Whilst The National Curriculum forms the basis of our content and coverage, our lenses provide the approach/angle/ethos through which the content is taught. Key themes, approaches, events and local decisions are made based upon the driver associated with each term’s learning.