The Connected Curriculum aims to develop children socially, academically and spiritually. Our primary aim is to help develop every child, so they are able to become an active member of our school community and society. In addition, the intent behind our curriculum is to contribute towards the cultural capital for children in terms of the knowledge and skills they need to be successful learners and in life. Our curriculum is unique as it is based on connectivity, making links between our reading, skills and knowledge as we build upon learning across subjects in each year group and across the children’s learning journey in our school. Our Connected Curriculum ensures progression for every child as the curriculum is personalised and designed to build upon the experiences and backgrounds of our children.

When developing the Connected Curriculum, we knew from our research that learning needed to be relational and the curriculum must be sequenced in a way that builds upon prior knowledge. Using schemata to identify relationships between information and linking knowledge. The National School Improvement Network shared a definition of learning: ‘Learning is a reflective activity which enables the learner to draw upon previous experience to understand and evaluate the present, so as to shape future action and formulate new knowledge.’

The Connected Curriculum is taught as discrete subjects, but the connectivity across them comes from the skills learnt, experienced and remembered being visited across subject areas. These skills are known as the Connected Curriculum Learning Language. The children use knowledge organisers to gather their powerful knowledge and subject acquisition. The Connected Curriculum Learning Language allows children to use the various learning and life skills across all subject areas, so that every Ravenscote child is able to engage, enrich and excel within the Connected Curriculum. 

The strongest aspects of the Connected Curriculum are reading (RWI and Jane Considine), writing (Jane Considine), maths (Mastery approach – resources such as Maths No Problem and White Rose), PSHE (Jigsaw and throughout our curriculum and culture), history (threads: Power, Progress and People), RAW (Religion and World Views) and our specialist teacher subjects of music, PE and Spanish.

The key aspects, which are currently evolving are science, Spanish and computing. In science, leaders are in the process of ensuring a consistent and linked structure across year groups to ensure skills and knowledge are retained and built upon. Following feedback from secondary schools, exploring increasing the practical skills. With Spanish, this language has been taught at Ravenscote since September 2021. The teacher is a second year ECT and is developing a new curriculum and language for the school. Key skills and knowledge taught to all children in year 1 with us and this is built upon through the school. We have now embedded the iCompute scheme for computing. This scheme pulls together the computing curriculum at Ravenscote and ensures that key knowledge and skills are built upon each year,

Reading is at the heart of the Connected Curriculum. When children join us in year three, we use the information provided by their infant schools and baseline assessments to ensure that we build upon their phonics and reading knowledge, to enable all children to access the Connected Curriculum. We begin the reading journey at Ravenscote with discrete phonics lessons each week and children who are in their early stages of reading follow the Read, Write, Inc. Phonics programme to support their reading development and to ensure that they are practising the sounds they are learning within texts. Children in Years 5 and 6, who are developing in early reading (including EAL learners) enter the Read, Write Inc. Fresh Start programme, taught by our specialist reading teacher. All teachers and Learning Support Assistants have had Read, Write Inc training (July 2022) and are able to use this in whole class, group and 1:1 learning.

All children have reading lessons every week. In our reading lessons, the children use a reading rainbow to help them understand texts. The rainbow is made up of a wide range of 'lenses' that enable the children to focus on specific elements of a text when reading. As we also use a writing rainbow, the children are able to read books through the author's eye and build the bridge between reading and writing. This knowledge and skill of reading supports the children’s progress across the Connected Curriculum, as they are able to access learning within all subjects.