Principles for Excellence in the Curriculum

The Staploe Education Trust expects each school to design and deliver a curriculum which is appropriate and responsive to the needs of the learners in its community, and which is:

• Ambitious, driving the highest expectations of what children and young people can know, do and understand. Learners will excel.
• Broad, rich and balanced, providing extensive curricular and extra-curricular opportunities to deepen knowledge, to build social and cultural capital. Learners will develop a love of learning.
• Coherent, ensuring no learning sits in isolation but is supported and enriched across subjects and throughout the learning journey. Content is carefully sequenced. The curriculum will be designed to maximise effective learning.
• Deep, designed so that knowledge is revisited, reframed and retained. Skills are mastered so that they can be transferred. Learners will develop fluency and agency.  They become independent thinkers and questioners – acquiring a firm foundation for lifelong learning and the capacity to contribute to new knowledge and scientific and technological change. 
• Inclusive, accessible to learners of all abilities and backgrounds and in which diversity is celebrated and equity pursued, to enable all students, and including disadvantaged and SEND students to succeed. The curriculum will address inequalities.
• Values-led so children take responsibility for themselves and their actions, and are respectful.  The curriculum will promote an understanding of rights and responsibilities, of global citizenship and of sustainable development.  Learners will challenge injustice and intolerance in all its forms.
• Empowering, promoting wellbeing and positive relationships, enabling young people to build their resilience, adopt healthy choices, experience risk and adventure and develop essential skills and attributes. Learners will thrive.

Museum Learning in the Staploe Curriculum

Working in partnership with the Cambridge University Museums, our curriculum will include teaching from museum objects to enhance learning across the curriculum.  In particular, this museum learning thread will build

• cultural capital and cultural literacy
• confidence in handling and observing objects through development of Slow Looking
• oracy, dialogue and discourse
• vocabulary enrichment and development
• aspiration about jobs and world of work as a result of opportunities within the museum sector
• positive experiences of museums to encourage a lifelong love of learning