Priory Curriculum

Curriculum Design: 

Our children are provided with a well taught, knowledge rich curriculum that offers a wide range of exciting learning opportunities and challenging activities for all our children where they will gain essential knowledge, skills and understanding to enable them to reach their full potential academically, physically, socially and artistically.  As a consultancy school, we use the ‘Grammarsaurus 3D Curriculum’ to  ensure the full implementation of the National Curriculum, ensuring breadth, balance and clear progression; this is further enhanced with a wide range of learning experiences that go above and beyond the National Curriculum objectives. Our expectations are high for all pupils: we never narrow our curriculum or deny any pupils the key knowledge taught to the class, unless it is absolutely in their best interest due to a significant learning need. 

We carefully consider our children and community to ensure our curriculum is bespoke to their needs and all teaching and learning is underpinned by our TOGETHER values.  Opportunities to promote British Values, SMSC and our equality objectives are incorporated across the Curriculum. Teachers have strong subject knowledge and learning is clearly sequenced over terms, years and throughout the school to ensure that knowledge is learnt and embedded. 

Our curriculum is brought to life through an enquiry-based approach (utilising the ‘Grammarsaurus 3D Curriculum’ and its aim is to lay a firm foundation for our children’s future endeavours and inspire them to be the best they can possibly be as responsible, engaged and digitally literate citizens of the future.  It is our vision that our curriculum, closely linked to careers education, will offer them a window to a wider world that they may not currently see and encourage them to have high aspirations and a drive to fulfil their full potential. 

As, according to cognitive scientists, nothing has been learnt until it is in your long-term memory, we focus on ensuring learning sticks. We understand through research, including with our children, what aids long term memory and include these strategies in all our teaching sequences. A focus on key knowledge for every topic and a clear assessment, away from the point of learning, demonstrates the effective implementation and impact of our curriculum. 

We believe that every child should have the skills they need to thrive during their school years and beyond. The ‘Secrets of Success’ behaviour for learning philosophy underpins all lessons and encourages children to develop skills such as perseverance, resilience, imagination and understanding.  We provide a creative and stimulating environment and an atmosphere of mutual respect. This enables the children to develop interpersonal skills, build resilience and become creative, critical thinkers.  

Our curriculum is designed to ensure that when our pupils leave Priory and move on to secondary education they have a secure understanding of the fundamental skills in reading, writing and maths. They can demonstrate positive attitudes to their learning: embracing challenge and exhibiting resilience and perseverance.  They will also be:  

• independent and inquisitive learners.   
• ambitious and take pride in all that they do.   
• articulate: demonstrating the ability to question, debate and challenge.  
• compassionate and caring: demonstrating high levels of empathy and respect for others. 
• confident and responsible citizens who contribute to and demonstrate an appreciation of the world they live in.   

Curriculum Delivery:  

Through our 3D curriculum and work with Grammarsaurus, we ensure that our children are able to see links in their learning and do not see subjects as stand-alone. Our planning ensures that there is clear sequencing and progression across all year groups. Our curriculum model ensures that our children know and remember more through cross-curricular links, being fully immersed in learning and spaced repetition.    

We use our curriculum as our narrative. We do this because every bit of knowledge is important.   

Curriculum as narrative is: each piece of knowledge builds on the next and takes on deeper meanings and understanding; as time goes by and the story is more fully understood.  A curriculum as a narrative approach does all of this and more.  

We have broken our curriculum into units. Our vibrant and rich curriculum is designed so that subject specific skills are scaffolded within and across our units. We block teach science, history, art, design and technology and geography. The reason for this is to fully immerse the children into the given subject to support them to know and remember more at a much deeper level. All other subjects continue to be taught weekly. Our curriculum is designed to bring all subject disciplines together so children can clearly see and understand links and it enables them to revisit learning more frequently. This encourages our children to link their learning and apply their skills in all areas.

Grammarsaurus Curriculum Explained

What is the Grammarsaurus 3D Curriculum?

The Grammarsaurus 3D curriculum is a comprehensive and interconnected educational framework that uses a “3D” model to ensure learning sticks and builds on prior knowledge. It is designed to create a cohesive learning experience by linking units within and across subjects like reading, writing, grammar, science, and art. Key features include cumulative assessments to check understanding, fully resourced and editable materials, and a focus on both substantive knowledge (facts) and disciplinary concepts (skills).

Key aspects of the 3D curriculum

• Personalised learning:

As a Grammarsaurus consultancy school, we have a personalised curriculum that meets the needs of our learners, in our context and our locality.

• Interconnected learning:

The “3D” model ensures each unit connects with current learning or reviews past material through conceptual links. This integrated approach helps children build a deeper understanding rather than memorizing isolated facts.

• Cumulative assessments:

The curriculum includes cumulative assessments to check for understanding. These allow teachers to identify areas that need further review or reinforcement before moving on.

• Comprehensive materials:

It provides a wide range of fully resourced and editable materials, including reading and writing plans, quality texts, and assessment materials, all available through a school subscription.

• Focus on both knowledge and skills:

The curriculum emphasizes both substantive knowledge (like the properties of 3D shapes) and disciplinary concepts (like the skills of a young artist).

• Integration across subjects:

The model aims to integrate learning across subjects. For example, it can link writing units with complimentary texts and uses a consistent approach to teaching skills like spelling, punctuation, and grammar across all grade levels.

• Clear progression:

Subject-specific skill progression documents and themes and concepts maps are used to show how learning builds over time, ensuring a clear pathway for students.

Quality First Teaching  

At Priory, we will ensure that: 

• staff have high expectations of themselves and of all the children   
• teachers impart knowledge accurately and with enthusiasm  
• teachers consider prior knowledge (learning from previous year groups/ units) and experiences which allows them to build upon this in a systematic way – revisit through the design of the ‘3D Curriculum’ to reignite prior learning
• encouragement and praise are used regularly to motivate children (through the school’s TOGETHER values and ‘the secrets of success’) 
• teachers provide high focused lesson design with clear objectives and lesson sections (Prior, New, Develop, Apply, Why, Reflect and Linked)  
• teachers ensure high levels of interaction for all children within the sessions 
• teachers appropriately use questioning, modelling and explaining to support the children 
• we are at the forefront of technology and the modern world through our utilisation of iPads  

Priory Curriculum Overviews