Shalbourne C of E Primary School

Knowledge Organisers

Re: Curriculum Initiatives at Shalbourne School

We have reviewed the content of our curriculum to ensure that there is a much greater emphasis on the ‘powerful knowledge’ that children need in order to not only truly understand concepts, but also to enable them to apply the knowledge, offer informed explanations, make links and spot patterns. Crucially, it will also provide them with the essential foundations for the next part of their educational journey and beyond.

Like all maintained schools in England and Wales, we have to follow the National Curriculum. Whilst we will continue to use this as our framework, we will not limit our curriculum content to the knowledge, skills and concepts covered within it, rather we will raise our expectations and not restrict the depth and breadth of children’s understanding.

We have looked at each subject and identified the essential knowledge that we feel is the children’s entitlement – and then decided how best to teach it. This will expose children to and give them access to content which is deeper and more sophisticated than we have taught before.

Predictably, these higher expectations will throw up a range of challenges for us; not least, ensuring that we develop the structures and systems which enable pupils to effectively retain (and then apply) the knowledge we are delivering.

To help meet this challenge, we are producing ‘Knowledge Organisers’ which are the ‘go-to’ documents outlining the essential knowledge that the teachers will be covering across a unit of work; including dates, key personnel, vocabulary, definitions, and other contextual or technical information. These ‘Knowledge Organisers’ will be shared with pupils and parents – with the aim that everyone knows exactly what is being taught, and what the children need to learn.

‘Knowledge Organiser’ for both classes will be uploaded to this page on the school website. As parents, please use this as a reference guide for what your child is learning, and also, as an opportunity to discuss the facts about the topic and how much they have learned. It can also be used to see if they are able to start making links or offer explanations about their topics.

We will continue to develop the use of Knowledge Organisers, producing them for the Science, History, Geography, Art and Design Technology topics across the academic year (sharing them with pupils and parents accordingly). All other subjects (literacy, numeracy, RE, Music, PSHE and French will be taught discretely).

Knowledge Organisers

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