Curriculum Intent Statement

The aim of the Ryarsh Primary School curriculum is to provide our children with powerful knowledge and skills that improve their life chances and those of their community. By powerful knowledge and skills, we refer to that which can enhance our children’s perceptions, values or understanding. Most importantly, it is knowledge that helps children understand and interpret the world through the lens of an inspired future, whilst unlocking doors to life beyond their immediate experiences.

Our curriculum is designed to ensure that our children feel represented and can ‘see themselves’. This ensures that our children can explore commonality and difference in a way that strengthens our inclusive culture. It is our aim for our children to use this understanding and appreciation of inclusivity to help challenge issues when required, as part of their pursuit towards becoming successful global citizens of the future.

Given our school context, we strive to make sure that we take our children outside of their own immediate world. Through the variety of subjects that are taught at Ryarsh Primary School, our curriculum weaves together as a whole narrative to offer our children a relevant and broader picture of modern Britain, and that of the wider world, helping to prepare them for their next stage of education.

We provide opportunities for children to develop as confident, resilient, respectful and motivated learners with high aspirations that have both the academic knowledge and personal qualities needed to succeed. Our curriculum is broad and balanced with a focus on intellectual, moral, spiritual, creative, social, emotional and physical development.

It is a curriculum that prioritises long-term learning (that is committed to long-term memory) over short-term performance, and has been designed to ensure that children are able to assimilate new learning into existing understanding in order to build a rich tapestry of knowledge.

Our curriculum aims to develop children’s understanding and use of vocabulary. The deeper word knowledge a child has, the more they are able to develop knowledge of new vocabulary. We aim to explicitly teach tier 2 words (academic vocabulary appearing frequently across our curriculum) as they act as a gateway to broader understanding across subjects. Tier 3 words are also taught to ensure that children #can build up their knowledge of technical, subject-specific words that rarely appear beyond individual subjects. This approach to teaching vocabulary ensures that our curriculum is accessible for all children (including those with additional needs).

The curriculum at Ryarsh Primary is not fixed, but is an authentic curriculum that is constantly evolving to meet the needs of the children at our school. The Ryarsh Curriculum, based on the requirements of the National Curriculum and Early Years Foundation Stage, is built on the following key concepts of curriculum design:

ryarsh curriculum intent statement for website.pdf

 Subject leaders play an important part in the success of the curriculum by leading a regular programme of monitoring, evaluation and review. 

If you would like any further information about our curriculum, please speak to our Headteacher.