At Foxes Piece School, our approach to teaching is simple yet effective. Our curriculum is carefully crafted to be rich in knowledge, well-organized, and always evolving. It's made with our students and community in mind, building on the national standards while keeping our five core values—respect, independence, equality, kindness, and resilience—at the heart of everything.

We love reading, and we celebrate diversity, ensuring our students get a well-rounded education. Alongside the regular curriculum, we spice things up with a variety of activities like clubs, trips, workshops, and special days. These experiences go beyond textbooks, giving our students opportunities to grow and learn in new and exciting ways.

Our teaching is influenced by practical research, making sure it's engaging, progressive, and effective. We focus on what works best for long-term learning. Our goal is not just to fill our students' heads with information but to help them truly understand and remember what they learn.

Ultimately, we want our students to succeed academically and be happy and healthy individuals. We believe that a great education not only opens doors but also broadens horizons. At Foxes Piece School, we're dedicated to creating an environment where our students can thrive.

Our curriculum drivers are:  

• Our 5 Foxy Values – respect, independence, equality, kindness and resilience 

• A love of reading 

• Embracing diversity 

We enrich our mastery curriculum with a wide of varied range of extra-curricular and enrichment activities including clubs, trips, wow days, workshops, visitors and focus days.   These give us the opportunity to immerse our pupils in rich learning experiences, opportunities for personal growth, new experiences beyond those that they already have.  

We use research (Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction as adopted by Tom Sherrington 2019) to ensure our teaching and learning is well sequenced, progressive, exciting and learnt. Our curriculum is grounded in the strongest evidence available about how pupils learn and retain knowledge in the long term.  Our children know more and remember more and talk passionately about their learning.  

Our curriculum is designed to foster both academic success and overall well-being for our children. 

We believe that great learning opens doors and expands horizons - pupils thrive at Foxes Piece School.  

Intention 

Our over-arching aim for our curriculum is to provide an excellent education for all our pupils, so that they leave Foxes Piece well prepared for the next stage of their education. Our motto ‘Everyone is Someone’ focuses on the importance of the individual whilst our school values (respect, kindness, equality, independence and resilience) encourage the children to look outside themselves to the impact their actions have on those around them and they have within their community, society and the wider world.  

Implementation 

Our comprehensive knowledge-based curriculum gives everyone a chance to learn, leveling the playing field and making it attainable by all. It gives the children the knowledge they need to engage with and contribute to the world around them.   This empowers them, offering opportunities to determine their own future.  

Our knowledge rich curriculum focuses on three key areas: 

Knowledge is valued and specified.  

We carefully consider our curriculum and care about what our pupils learn – which books they should read, which historical periods they should study and what artwork should be explored.   This is explicit in our curriculum maps, lesson plans and high-quality resources. 

Knowledge is well-sequenced.  

We have carefully thought about the sequence of the knowledge learnt to enable pupils to revisit knowledge regularly and think about it deeply, understanding it in a cumulative manner e.g. our Ark science curriculum.  

Knowledge is taught to be remembered. 

We want what we teach to be remembered.  Rosenshine’s principles of instruction is why we advocate explicit instruction, break content into manageable chunks and why we recap prior learning at the start of every lesson.  

We work hard to ensure that all our children are given the knowledge and confidence to achieve their best. As an inclusive school, all children are catered for, pupils with SEND receive additional support, as appropriate, to ensure all children make progress and regular meetings with parents identify progress towards key targets as overseen by our SENDco team.  

Impact 

Our broad and balanced curriculum ensures that children know more and remember more over time. This is evident in our formative and summative assessments together with our conversations with pupils and parents.   

All assessments are used to track progress, identify learning gaps and to inform future teaching and planning to ensure that all our children make very good progress and leave us as well-rounded young people, who embody our values and carry with them the knowledge, skills and attributes to make them life-long learning and valuable future citizens.