At the beginning of 2024, we were selected to join a national project alongside 5 other schools to work with The Chartered College of Teaching and The University of Central London to take part in a 1-year pilot project all around rethinking the curriculum, funded by The Helen Hamlyn Trust.

Throughout this year-long journey, we have worked closely together as a staff team, talked and then talked some more about what our vision for the school is and what experiences we want to offer the children who come to our school and, more importnatly, to explore the driver behind offering certain experiences over others.  As part of the project, we were paired with a 1:1 consultant, Julia Hancock from Boundless Education Trust, to help guide and explore our thoughts around where we believed we were at with our curriculum at the very beginning of the project.  From those initial discussions and, through a thorough ‘dissection’ of our curriculum, we were empowered to focus on what would make the most significant impact on our children’s learning; our community’s importance as a factor in curriculum development and our own teaching pedegogy.  Over the course of the next seven months we have refined our vision into concise steps to move us forward.

Our focus has always been around place and the community we are based within; we wanted to create a sense of purpose and belonging. The project has brought out the commonalities we all share and given us research-based evidence to put together a clear vision, with inputs and outputs, to achieve what we are striving for.

So after a year, although the curriculum has not changed what we do, how we approach it and what we offer now reflects much more of us as a community and as a school. We now are focused on implementing and reviewing each stage to continue tweaking and rethinking our curriculum.

Please click on the link below to read the blog we wrote at the very start of our journey for the Chartered College of Teaching website:

https://chartered.college/2024/02/05/empowering-rural-education/

We are very pleased to have been told by the Chartered College of Teaching that, through the work of all five of the pilot schools last year, funding has been secured for the project to be extended for a further 3-years, which is amazing and a very exciting time in our school’s development long-term. We can’t wait to get started on the next chapter.

For details and further information about the initial pilot, please click on the links below to find out more:

Rethinking Curriculum – Pilot School Role Description

School Co-design Pilot Information

Helen Hamlyn Centre for Pedagogy – Experiential Learning for Children aged 4-14