The Inspire Curriculum
At Tor Bridge Primary School, we are proud to have an ambitious, knowledge-rich curriculum which stimulates our children into independently minded, confident and kind citizens of the future, who aspire to ‘go out into the world and do well, but more importantly go out into the world and do good’.
Our curriculum is engaging, innovative, built on first-hand experiences and celebrates all curriculum areas, helping to ensure that our children develop the knowledge and skills they need to excel, and become creative and curious citizens that are required to achieve academic excellence at secondary school and beyond.
Our curriculum has been designed to encompass a knowledge and understanding of the locality in the South West of England, and also the events that have shaped it in the past to make it what it is today. The word ‘currere’ provides insights into an understanding of curriculum as narrative by revealing its journeying nature, its spatiotemporal constraints that ought to be acknowledged and the fact that the curriculum is not only the journey but the story of that journey understood as a whole.
Our curriculum is far more than just a clearly sequenced set of facts. The concepts are the holding baskets for all we want our children to learn and this is developed through narrative and high-quality texts. When we structure the information we wish to present under a broader narrative structure, each piece of knowledge becomes important. Without each Area of Study, the story won’t make sense. Like a novel, it is possible to read it quickly to get the gist of the story but the deeper themes, conventions and nuances won’t be appreciated. The Inspire Curriculum as narrative is just like this: each piece of knowledge builds on the next and takes on deeper meanings and understandings as children progress both within and across year groups.
Each of the Areas of Study have been coherently designed to build on one another with clear progression and links so that in subsequent year groups, they will be able to explore concepts deeper, applying their knowledge in different contexts. The curriculum at Tor Bridge Primary School is grounded in the strongest available evidence about how pupils learn and retain knowledge in the long term, focusing in particular on research from cognitive science. Our teachers explicitly help their pupils make links between the information they learn, they help them build a detailed, easily recalled web of knowledge from long term memory.