Skip to content ↓

Our Curriculum

Our current Curriculum Policy can be found by clicking here

Please find our Annual Plans for each year group in our Thameside Team information area of the website by clicking here

Our Curriculum Topic Map aims to make links across these key themes:

‘Curriculum’ The curriculum is all the planned activities that we organise in order to promote learning and personal growth and development, including the knowledge and understanding to be gained at each stage. Our curriculum starts with the National Curriculum (which you can download below) and also includes the range of extracurricular activities that the school organises in order to enrich the experience of the children. It also includes the ‘hidden curriculum’, or what the children learn from the way they are treated and expected to behave.

‘Progress’ Children at Thameside make progress by:

Knowing more, remembering more, doing more, feeling more.

Curriculum Statement of Intent

Through the Thameside Primary curriculum, we intend that all children will:

  • Make significant progress during their time at Thameside Primary School
  • Experience a broad and balanced education that is tailored to the context, needs and values of our school
  • Cover less content in subject areas, like History, but go into far greater depth
  • Develop and embed in their memories the knowledge, skills, understanding and vocabulary that will enrich their experience in all subject areas and empower them to access the next stage of their education
  • Value learning for its own sake and develop a range of skills, aptitudes and personal qualities to take into life. These will include non-cognitive skills (such as resilience, working with others, acceptance of feedback and kindness), metacognitive skills (such as planning, monitoring and evaluation) and study skills (such as retrieval practice, spaced practice and dual coding).
  • Know how to make the community a better place and contribute positively to society.

Our Curriculum Journey

Ensuring that children are successful academically is a crucial part of education but of paramount importance is that they also learn how to live successful and happy lives where they are informed, courageous advocates of the things that matter to them. In a nutshell, we want to ensure that our curriculum is as rich in teaching and instilling values as it is in knowledge.

With the skills, experience and passion in our staff team, we have begun to develop our foundation subject curriculum on the principles above. Therefore, since September 2019, we have been ‘plaiting’ these key areas into our knowledge based curriculum:

  • Coherence – is there a logical arc to the curriculum?
  • Compassion – is the curriculum developing care and compassion in young people and is it equally showing care and compassion to them in its application?
  • Creativity – is there enough scope for young people to apply their knowledge in unfamiliar contexts, showing fluency?
  • Credibility -  is the curriculum accountable to knowledge and ensuring that knowledge is secure?
  • Community – what expertise within the local community is being accessed and how is the local area being utilised to support learning. How is the curriculum reaching out to the community?

We also aim to further motivate and engage our pupils through our use of audiences e.g. presenting structures built in DT to a real engineer, for example.

We hope you find what you need here, but if not please contact the school via the information on the 'Contact us' page.