Atlas Astrea Academy Trust
Atlas’ Knowledge Rich Curriculum
All children have the right to a good quality education. UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Article 28)
At Atlas Academy we expect the highest aspirations for our pupils. We want all children to learn and make academic progress no matter their starting points. We have a clear vision for what we want pupils to achieve during their time at Atlas and have designed our curriculum to give all pupils the knowledge, skills and understanding they will need in their future years.
The Big Picture
Our curriculum is ambitious in its aim and includes three key drivers:
- language & vocabulary acquisition;
- aspiration;
- cultural awareness building.
This means that everything we do within our curriculum is shaped by these three aspects. We call this The BIG Picture.
British Values (BV) and spiritual, moral, social and cultural development (SMSC) underpin our curriculum. Click here to see how we encompass these at Atlas Academy.
Our Curriculum Overview
Basic Principles
- Our curriculum places ‘Powerful Knowledge’ – knowledge that takes pupils beyond their own experiences – at the heart of the primary curriculum.
- Learning is a change to long-term memory.
- Our pupils experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge.
- Our curriculum is underpinned by the development of strong emotional and social skills. Positive interactions and good relationships within our learning community form the foundation of positive conditions for learning.
Click here to read our Curriculum Rationale. This will tell you about the planning of the curriculum, how we implement the curriculum and how we measure impact.
What we learn: curriculum content
Our curriculum is knowledge rich. It has been designed to ensure that our pupils are taught the content of the EYFS framework and the National Curriculum. The content of our curriculum focuses on core concepts for NC subject disciplines and we use materials from the Knowledge Schools Trust Primary Knowledge Curriculum and other high quality schemes which we adapt to a cohesive whole. Subjects are taught discretely and we make interdisciplinary links between them to strengthen schema where relevant and appropriate.
Opportunities are planned across the curriculum to enable pupils to apply and connect knowledge, skills and understanding. This starts in the early years, where we have taken the EYFS framework and carefully planned a sequential and progressive learning journey that connects to the KS 1/2 curriculum. (reference EYFS long term plan and KS 1/2 overviews).
We aim to deliver high quality instruction using evidence from cognitive science to support strong teaching. For example, opportunities for retrieval practice and repetition so that pupils learn and remember more over their time with us.
Click here to view our curriculum. This will show you what children will be learning in each subject in each year group.
The curriculum areas
In this section you will find information on the different curriculum content areas. (Please note that as at January 2022 we are currently reviewing our subject content for subjects to ensure they are up to date and reflect our curriculum plans). Please click on each area for more information: