Fordbridge Community Primary School's curriculum is designed to promote and embed life-long learning behaviours through: independence, choice, collaboration, aspiration and personal discovery. We provide rich and varied extra – curricular opportunities for all groups of children. We place high importance on the school community and always ensure that our resources, lessons, experiences and curriculum are tailored to the area we serve, whilst also ensuring exposure to the wider world and current affairs.

Our fully inclusive curriculum embraces a ‘keep up, not catch up’ philosophy, meaning all staff have consistently high expectations for all children in our school. Where children have Special Educational Needs, a team works around that child to ensure that they are given the best tools and skills to access the curriculum in order to achieve their full potential.

The ethos behind the Fordbridge learning style is the promotion of Enquiry Based Learning using the schools outstanding facilities as a vessel to support this. We have the National Curriculum, which we use as a starting point, and embellish and deepen further as a school.

We are a research-informed school and have designed the whole curriculum with research and proven best practice at its heart.  Through collaboration with experts (Historical/Geographical Society, or schemes) we have carefully broken the content down and sequenced logically to allow for progression, with regular opportunities to revisit and reactivate prior knowledge, supporting children to know more and therefore remember more.

Substantive knowledge refers to the factual content or the "what"

Disciplinary knowledge refers to the processes and methods 

At the heart of this is children being exposed to quality experiences and lessons with an element of choice and need for independent thinking. Parental involvement is ever improving and evolving, and children are immersed into experiences with visits or off timetable days of discovery. Parents coming into school to join in on some of these experiences bolsters our offer and deepens the experiences further. We are problem solvers, leaders, collaborators, analysists, questioners, innovators and explorers! This academic year we are embedding our own Characteristics for Effective Learning across the school, in order to embed our passion of developing ‘learners and not children who learn’. These characteristics will be differentiated throughout the key stages in order to prepare our learners as ‘people’ for secondary school and beyond. Within every stage of a child’s journey at Fordbridge, children contribute to the direction of the learning process and are given the opportunity to help sculpt the direction of the curriculum through various different councils, which is a reflection of pupil voice at Fordbridge. Our curriculum uses technology, collaboration and encouragement as the basis for encouraging learning. The learning and development of young people continues after school, through a rich extra-curricular timetable. Our rich and varied extra- curricular programme continues to develop our children’s life skills way beyond the traditional curriculum subjects with over 35 clubs per week available for children both before and after school. Through Fordbridge University and the collaboration with various local businesses, we are creating; doctors, hairdressers, engineers, beauticians, chefs, builders, carpenters, plumbers, bank managers, teachers, fashion designers and many more. But more importantly, we are providing the choice, freedom and belief for children to sculpt and design their own future and destiny!

The Fordbridge mindset places the learner back at the center of the curriculum and insists practitioners consider… "What do we want our children to learn and retain, what personal and educational tools will they need to get there, what could be the possible outcomes and how will these skills relate to the lives children lead within and beyond our community". It is beginning to produce children who must and can, think for themselves, be resilient and face challenges with strategies to overcome and progress. As a result of this, children will be successful learners, who can apply their learning skills and knowledge set out in the national curriculum, in order to meet national expectations and make better than expected progress from their baselines.

At Fordbridge we monitor the understanding and retention of knowledge and skills through regular retrieval quizzes, feedback and carefully planned end point opportunities to portray progress tasks,  as a platform for children to independently showcase the knowledge and skills transferred into long term memory.  Formative assessment is key, through questioning and live feedback in lessons. Alongside this we use summative assessments in Reading, Writing and Maths termly. 

Each term, teachers and subject leaders collaborate to identify pupils who are not meeting age related expectation, identify barriers and plan opportunities to close gaps. With rigorous and bespoke support and CPD opportunities, middle leaders are given the tools to monitor the impact of their subjects on pupils' long term outcomes and respond to national changes and picture. Children leave Fordbridge with a sense of belonging to a tightly-knit community where they have the confidence and skills to make decisions, reflect and self-evaluate, make connections and become lifelong learners. With a solid foundation of our golden values: respect, resilience, reliability and responsibility.

Our Termly expectations are the basis for all learning opportunities and these are steadily built upon throughout the school year to enable children to progress from their starting points. The carefully thought out learning environment enables children to follow their desires and interests and connect with their learning through direct teaching and purposefully planned play opportunities. We are a team of practitioners all of whom possess high expectations which promote our four core school values of being reliable, resilient, responsible and respectful. We provide experiences, opportunities and skills that are carefully planned and well taught to enable children to progress in all areas of their learning. As a phase we ensure the learning journey for all learners is continually progressive incorporating breath, balance and depth. As children develop their individual skill set, learning will become more discovery and enquiry led bespoke to each individual.