Curriculum

General note:

Our curriculum, will initially, follow a similar design to the other primary academies within our Trust. However, though each has a similar structure and ethos, the curriculum is individual to each academy and this successful philosophy will be replicated at Scartho Gateway Academy.

It is crucial that the curriculum is relevant and appropriate for the context of Scartho Gateway Academy, reflecting its pupils and the local community. Importantly, we want elements of our curriculum to reflect the voice of our different stakeholders, most notably, our pupils. Therefore, throughout the first year, our curriculum will be revisited and reviewed, whilst not detracting from the strong core of what we wish to deliver.

Part of our context involves the Resource Specialist Provision (RSP) for children with SEMH needs. Though the structure of the curriculum in the RSP will be different and to an extent, unique for each individual, our design will reflect the importance of ensuring all children in the RSP will integrate into lessons in the mainstream classes across the academy’, supporting and enhancing their knowledge of key areas of knowledge, both substantive and disciplinary.

Linked to the above, we are also working closely with Trauma Informed Schools UK to ensure our curriculum is fully reflective of our context.

We have now fully recruited and have already started working with our new teachers and subject leaders. Each has been allocated subject leader roles and we have started arranging for leaders to meet and work with current leaders within our existing primary academies to discuss each subject area to support the development of our curriculum.

Mrs Melanie Portlock
Principal
May 2025

Curriculum Intent: What are our ultimate goals?

Our curriculum is rooted in the belief that every child, regardless of their background or need, deserves a rich, ambitious, and inclusive education. Our curriculum will:

• Place reading and oracy at the centre to empower expression, vocabulary growth and access to knowledge.
• Be ambitious, ensuring all pupils, including those with SEMH and SEND, achieve strong outcomes, both academic and personal.
• Offer sequenced learning designed around clear, meaningful endpoints.
• Build cultural capital through enrichment and experiential learning, including bespoke interventions for pupils with additional needs.
• Teach protected characteristics, British values, and concepts of consent, responsibility, and respect in developmentally appropriate ways.
• Provide a broad and balanced education for all pupils;
• Provide pupils with the ability to develop a deep learning of knowledge and the mechanisms for retrieving and applying knowledge.
• Inspire and challenge all learners to aspire to high achievement;
• Ensure pupils’ knowledge is fully developed to support their social, moral, spiritual and cultural awareness to promote diversity and key values;
• Develop pupils who are tolerant, respectful and understanding;
• Provide equal opportunities for all pupils, with high expectations for every learner ensuring appropriate levels of challenge and support;
• Support pupils to make progress by remembering more and knowing more.
• Develop key skills such as teamwork; independence, resilience; responsibility; and communication;
• Ensure pupils have a wide knowledge of career opportunities in a local and wider national context;
• Provide pupils with leadership opportunities to develop strength of character and self-confidence;
• Ensure pupils’ have wider opportunities to develop an interest and fascination in subjects and topics that interest them or that might interest them;
• Consider barriers to learning, linked to the local context and the circumstances faced by individual students;
• Promote an awareness of key issues such as healthy living; democracy and national and international events.

Subject Leaders

We will be working closely with our colleagues at Waltham Gateway Academy, alongside other academies within our Trust to ensure we fully deliver ‘our ultimate goals’ as stated above. Initially, our subject leaders will work across both Scartho Gateway Academy and Waltham Gateway Academy to ensure we adopt a fully collaborative approach and allow each Subject Leader the time and opportunity needed to firmly embed our curriculum during the first year.

Curriculum Implementation:

Intended depth of knowledge:

Our curriculum design is based on research and latest educational guidance. For example, the philosophy behind the development and understanding of deep knowledge, as promoted by Chris Quigley and other educationalists. When we originally started re-designing our curriculum across our primary academies in 2019, we used the model set out through the Chris Quigley curriculum, as a basis and guide, to help plan and sequence some aspects of our curriculum in order to provide students with different types of deep knowledge. This has adapted considerably over time and we have regularly updated and reviewed our offer over the last 4 years, though the fundamentals have stayed the same. It is based on the following, which will underpin everything we teach at Scartho Gateway Academy:

Learning is a change to long-term memory, and everything in long-term memory is Knowledge. Types of Knowledge can be categorised in several ways.

Most of our learning revolves around the following:

Substantive Knowledge: established facts, e.g. the earth is the planet on which we live.

Disciplinary Knowledge: the methods that establish the substantive facts, e.g. observation of the sun, moon and stars, satellite photographs.

What subjects do we teach?

We teach a full range of subjects, as individual subjects, to all pupils and ensure sufficient coverage is given to each area to ensure the pupils receive a broad and balanced curriculum. The subjects covered are:

• Art & Design
• Computing
• Design & Technology
• English
• Geography
• History
• Mathematics
• Modern Foreign Languages: Spanish
• Music
• Religious Education
• Physical Education
• PSHE
• Science

Where relevant, curriculum leaders have good knowledge of where these topics link to the EYFS curriculum.

How is the timetable structured?

Having tried various models, including teaching through a thematic approach, we found that all methods had their strengths but often some restrictions. In September 2022, in other primary academies within our trust, we moved to a timetable which allows sufficient and appropriate coverage to the wider curriculum subjects.

Each subject is timetabled for each pupil in KS1 and KS2. For example, pupils will have a Science lesson; History lesson; Music lesson etc.

However, our curriculum allows some flexibility. For example, in some subjects such as Computing and Art & Design, we might teach a double lesson every fortnight. We feel that this offers the chance for greater development of skills and knowledge due to the nature of the subjects and the resources involved. Also, teachers can use their professionalism to adapt lessons – for example, if they wish to extend a Mathematics lesson by 15 minutes, our timetable allows this to happen.

In addition, we might choose to teach Design & Technology in a block at the end of each half-term due to the nature of the subject. Where relevant.

This design has been chosen to ensure pupils can access and be successful in areas where they might have a particular talent or where they can achieve more successfully than in traditional subjects. For example, where a child may struggle with reading, they may be a very talented musician or have a passion for History. It allows for the development of deep, subject specific knowledge and skills and the structure enables all pupils to be fully prepared for transition to secondary education.

Do we follow any particular schemes?

We use a number of resources to support the delivery of our curriculum subject areas. For example, we use some elements of the Chris Quigley Essentials curriculum, where we use milestones to help teach and assess knowledge and skills taught across year groups. We use a wide range of resources across subjects. For example, we adapt the White Rose programme in Mathematics; we use Bug Club to deliver Phonics; Kapow to support our teaching of Design and Technology and Language Angels to support the teaching of Modern Foreign Languages.

Importantly, where we do use a scheme, it is to guide and support the delivery of our curriculum. We do not follow individual lessons plans and also lessons are adapted for the needs of the pupils in the class.

How do we teach and assess knowledge, providing students with the ability to know and remember deep knowledge?

Some of our wider curriculum subjects, such as History and Geography, follow the methods outlined through the Chris Quigley Essentials curriculum, which we have adapted for Scartho Gateway Academy. The main principles largely run through other subjects too.

Our long-term and medium-term plans and whole academy mapping, are designed to provide breadth of knowledge and focus on key topics, each with key knowledge categories.

• For example, in History, we look at topics such as the Victorians, the Stone Age and World War II.
• Alongside this, within subject areas, we have schemas, which provide knowledge categories, which are common threads throughout a subject. For example, in Geography, the schema consists of location; physical features; human features; diversity; physical processes; human processes and techniques.
• These in turn, helps to provide intra-curricular themes and helps to sequence knowledge across the Academy.
• The schema runs throughout each subject and across all year groups. This helps to sequence our curriculum. For example, in Art & Design, the following knowledge categories run across all year groups: Media and Materials; Techniques; Process; Colour Theory; Emotions; Artists and Artisans; Effects; Visual language and Styles and Periods.

We work on a two-year cycle, which allows for the re-visiting of topic areas, though with a different focus within each cycle. This allows for excellent retrieval opportunities and good opportunities to firmly embed deep knowledge over time.

For example, in History, in Years 3 and 4, we teach a unit on The Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age, over a two-year period (the Autumn Term in both years). When the pupils go on to study the Romans and they focus on the building of such structures as the Colosseum, pupils will be able to make comparison with the work they will have completed in the Stone Age topic, which focuses on the changing nature of dwellings and settlements. Similarly, when the pupils focus on the development of bronze and iron to create new weapons for hunting and fighting, there will be scope for making comparisons with the nature of conflict used in the Crimean War (Milestone 1) and later, when they are looking at weapons used in battle, when studying the Romans (Milestone 2) and the Greeks and World War II (Milestone 3). In addition, a series of lessons focuses on the development of beliefs and religion, which again will help compare and contrast when studying later modules on the Romans and Egyptians (Milestone 2) and the Greeks (Milestone 3).

In addition, subjects have Threshold Concepts, which again, run across the subjects across year groups. These are the big ideas that underpin each subject area. For example, in Geography, the threshold concepts are: Investigate Places; Investigate Patterns and Communicate Geographically.

Throughout the teaching of individual topics, assessment opportunities are built in throughout. These are called POP tasks (Proof of Progress). For example, in Design & Technology, on the topic of ‘Pneumatics,’ pupils might be asked to:

• Describe the type of movement of a piston.
• Define the word compressed.

Planning Documents:

We use a variety of long-term and medium-term plans, which vary between subjects, to help ensure our curriculum is well-sequenced. For example, in the example below, you can see how there is focus on developing substantive and disciplinary knowledge over a two-year period.

How do we ensure knowledge is secure?

Assessment opportunities are built in throughout each topic. This will mainly be in the form of on-going formative assessments in lessons and throughout topics, but will also include end of topic assessments to assess knowledge. Lessons are structured to give students constant opportunities to retrieve knowledge, through simple questioning and a wide range of activities. There is a focus on constant re-visiting of knowledge both from recent and less recent lessons, to help constantly retrieve and build a bank of deep knowledge that can be recalled.

Using this approach, the intention is to build up this knowledge across year groups. For example, in Year 1, students will look at knowledge categories of location, physical features and human features when studying The United Kingdom in Geography – those same knowledge categories will be taught through the topic of Continents and Oceans – thereby, giving the students the opportunity to make links and remember/retrieve knowledge from previous work.

Topics are mapped and sequenced across each subject and each year group so as to build on prior knowledge.

In some subjects, we have started preparing exemplar responses to support staff with expectations and to help children aspire to high quality outcomes. Using the same example as outlined above, below is an example of such exemplar responses:

• ‘Do you agree that the invention of the steam engine was the most important innovation of the Industrial Revolution period? Give reasons for your answer. ‘Though there were many key inventions and innovations that led to the Industrial Revolution, it is clear that the invention of the steam engine was the most significant. Firstly, as coal was needed to heat water to make steam, factories were opened near to supplies of water and coal which led to the growth of large, important towns in areas such as the Midlands and the North West of England…’
• Describe what life was like in factories in Britain during the early period of the Industrial Revolution. ‘In the 1800s, it became common place to employ women and children to work in factories. Conditions in many factories were challenging and often dangerous. For example, children often had to work 12–14 hour shifts, 6 days a week. In addition, there was little safety equipment, so children would often get injured or killed by fast-moving machinery…’

Teachers and curriculum leaders then use this knowledge and data to inform future planning.

What roles do Subject Leaders play in supporting staff and ensuring individual curriculum intents are achieved?

Each Subject Leader is responsible for the intent, implementation and impact of their subject areas. We are currently working on our, ‘Subject on a Page’ documents which is a summary of the plan for each subject.

Leaders are given opportunities to train staff through weekly staff meetings and senior leaders provide opportunities for curriculum leaders to receive and attend CPD.

Subject Leaders will monitor the teaching of their subject through means such as learning walks; lesson observations; book scrutinies; discussions with pupils and data analysis. This includes linking to the EYFS curriculum.

How do we ensure the curriculum meets the needs of all pupils?

Our curriculum has been designed to be accessible for all pupils. Each topic and individual lesson is adapted to cater for individual needs. This ensures that teachers can provide assessment opportunities for a range of abilities, adapting work to ensure that all pupils, including those with SEND, can access topic areas and achieve at their own pace.

Part of our motivation for giving adequate coverage to all curriculum areas is to ensure that there are opportunities for pupils to express themselves; achieve; enhance talents, in areas where they might shine e.g. art, science, history, PE.

Teachers will use a range of resources, including interactive displays and working walls, alongside individual resources and scaffolding techniques to help all pupils access the curriculum.

We ensure that we employ latest guidance, such as that advocated by the EEF, to ensure staff receive regular training to continually develop and enhance practice.

What role does enrichment play to deliver key aspects of our curriculum intent?

Enrichment is a key part of the implementation of our overall curriculum.

We offer a wide range of after school clubs which are available to all pupils at no additional financial charge. Recent examples in some of our other primary academies include cheerleading; choir; football; netball and gardening.

External visitors help to inspire and develop cultural capital. For example, in some of our other academies, we have held workshops hosted by an international free-style footballer; a Commonwealth athlete and a local author. In addition, one academy hosted the English Heritage Society, who delivered workshops on local Viking History.

Opportunities for parental engagement are key. For example, one of our other primary academies organised a Race for Life event attended by over 200 family members, raising over £1600; we raised over £500 through a cake sale, where parents provided over 1000 cakes and we organised for parents to attend performances by our choir and cheerleaders.

Outdoor learning is also a key focus, and will be a key part of our curriculum. For example, we are currently waiting to see if we have been awarded an allotment to support many areas of the curriculum. It is also our long-term plan to achieve Forest School status.

Assemblies also play a key role in the implementation of our curriculum. Alongside special mentions assembly, celebrating success, we also hold weekly singing assemblies and a weekly assembly which focuses on a local or national event, using resources supplied by Picture News.

We also build time in to our curriculum for whole class story time to help promote a love of reading.

In addition, we have worked closely with an external company, Pentagon Play, to design our outside play areas for both Early Years and the RSP to ensure they support different areas of learning and enrichment.

How do we ensure SMSC is a key focus for our pupils?

SMSC is a key focus across each of our academies and in 2024, Pilgrim Academy was awarded the Gold SMSC quality mark for schools, which was led by Mrs Melanie Portlock, Principal of Scartho Gateway Academy. It is the intention that we will be in a position to achieve this prestigious award over the next few years.

SMSC permeates through all aspects of school life. For example, it is prominent through subject areas, such as RE and PSHE but also far more widely through most curriculum subjects, including History and Geography.

SMSC also flows though enrichment; leadership schemes; links with the local community etc. Children are encouraged to be leaders and learn key British values such as tolerance, democracy and the rule of law; children are taught to respect and appreciate different religions, cultures and British Values within their learning. This is achieved through the curriculum, assemblies, enrichment, visits and visitors as well as participation in local and national events.

In turn, the above helps to embed an understanding of the importance of the protected characteristics.

Leadership opportunities include whole school council; house captains; playground monitors; playground buddies; reading buddies and library monitors.

What steps do we take to support our pupils with an understanding of career opportunities, helping them to aspire to achieve whatever they want to achieve?

Linked to the above, we strive to make links with our local community, including businesses and employers and we have already started making vital links with the Scartho community, through a number of events held throughout 2024 and 2025.

To highlight the importance of this aspect across our Trust, at one of our other primary academies, all pupils visited the Immingham docks for a full guided tour, organised by APB Immingham Ports; as part of a Primary Engineer programme, the academy was visited by members from Equans, who talked to pupils about life as an engineer; and Year 1 pupils attended a workshop on bricklaying, as part of their topic of looking at the Three Little Pigs.

We will ensure that our pupils are fully integrated into the Scartho community and have a full awareness of local, regional and national career opportunities for the to aspire to.

How do we celebrate our pupils’ successes, helping to develop confidence and build self-esteem?

We use a variety of methods to celebrate and reward success. These include weekly Special Mentions assemblies, attended by parents; daily social media posts; regular news items on our website; use of our on-line Reward system, amongst many daily systems employed by staff.

Curriculum Impact

Linked to our curriculum intent, our pupils will have been taught and supported to:

• Feel safe, valued, and known as individuals.
• Engage in learning because they are encouraged and supported to feel successful.
• Be well-prepared for their next phase of education, socially and academically.
• Achieve and make progress across the curriculum;
• Develop a deep understanding of different types of knowledge to support everything outlined in our curriculum intent;
• Develop as individuals through the wider enrichment and extra-curricular programme, giving them the cultural capital to be successful in the next stage of their education, whilst looking beyond to later career development;
• Become reflective learners who can talk about their thinking and feelings constructively.
• Have clear understanding and built knowledge of local industries and businesses, giving them knowledge of opportunities, both local and national;
• Have been supported to combat any barriers to learning, particularly in relation to combating any issues raised by the local context of the Academy, and particularly in relation to any students with additional needs and/or for whom the Academy receives additional funding;
• Be inspired, knowing that they can be successful in whatever they want to achieve in life;
• Be tolerant, caring, understanding and active local, national and global citizens.