At Throckley Primary School, we are committed to providing a purposeful and empowering curriculum that fully prepares learners for the next steps in their school career and opens the doors to the wider world.  Core literacy and numeracy skills are at the heart of all we do and our ambitious curriculum provokes curiosity and excitement.

Everything begins with our curriculum drivers. They are woven through all that we do and underpin our shared belief that our role is to support children in aspiring to achieve, understanding their place in the world and broadening their horizons.

We believe it is our responsibility to show children that at there is a world of possibility awaiting them, outside of the school gates. We also strive to encourage a love of learning, and a metacognitive understanding of how we can best learn and self-regulate, that will continue into secondary school and beyond.

Our curriculum is tailored to the needs of all of our children. We celebrate our local heritage and nurture children’s understanding of the communities of which they are a part. Significant people have been woven through each area of our curriculum. These include people of local, national and international significance. The study of significant individuals brings life to our learning, meaning children are more likely to recall key facts and events.

Our sequential curriculum ensures that knowledge is cumulative. Substantive and disciplinary knowledge is at the heart of each subject and linked areas of study are exploited in order to consolidate and embed learning across the curriculum, meaning that mental models are developed over time. At Throckley Primary School, we pride ourselves on evidence-informed practice. We understand that memory lies at the heart of learning and therefore we strategically plan opportunities for children to recall and remember. This allows memories to be strengthened, meaning that children can draw on previous learning with confidence in order to build and connect.

We understand the importance of building children’s vocabulary; we achieve this through carefully chosen and ambitious shared texts, as well as the explicit teaching of new and ambitious words, relevant to learning. Subject-specific vocabulary is mapped across school and children use this in their independent work.

A shared love of literature sits alongside our curriculum drivers and underpins all that we do; books are the building blocks of our rich curriculum. We harness the power of story; texts are valued both as a key learning resource across the curriculum, and for pleasure and escapism. Our Throckley Primary reading bookshelves outline the stories shared in each year group, while our Must Reads give structure to children’s reading diet. Texts we share are inclusive, ensuring representation of gender and ethnicity.

The Throckley OWLs (Our Wonderful Learners) encourage positive learning behaviours and support children in developing the skills that we believe are necessary for success in the wider world. Our OWLs have evolved from the action research we have conducted as a school on dialogic talk and self-regulation. At Throckley Primary School, we encourage children to actively plan, monitor and evaluate their own learning; through a focus on metacognition, children understand their own learning processes with increased confidence and resilience.

Inclusive to all learners, Throckley celebrates individuality and embraces difference. As a school community, we learn from each other and share experiences, thoughts and ideas in order to develop shared tolerance, acceptance and understanding. At the end of children’s time at Throckley Primary, we proudly say goodbye to confident and resilient individuals who are fully prepared for the next steps in their education, and who understand the difference they can make to their community.

#ThriveAtThrockley