“The more you know, the more complex and interesting connections you can make.” Didau and Rose

 

At Firfield, we place powerful knowledge at the very heart of our curriculum. We want to teach our children the very best of what has been thought and said. When developing our curriculum, we have thought meticulously about what we teach using the latest findings from cognitive research to ensure that the knowledge we teach is specified, sequenced and remembered.

A knowledge rich curriculum exposes children to ambitious content that enables all children to be provided with the opportunities to succeed throughout their time at Firfield and in later life. Through explicit teaching, the use of knowledge organisers, spaced retrieval, formative 'low-stakes' quizzing and plenty of practice, we have developed a curriculum to develop knowledge fluency that goes beyond the National Curriculum. This ensures that our pupils secure a solid base to build on as they move through school and into Key Stage 3 and beyond.  

At Firfield, we recognise and promote the identity of the individual subjects we study. We aim to foster a love for subjects which will flourish as the children progress through the curriculum. We want the children to know what it is to be a historian or a scientist, and to develop the background knowledge and disciplinary skills to become the historians, artists, designers, scientists and geographers of the future. 

The knowledge content of our curriculum is specified in granular detail. We don’t want to merely ‘do the Romans’ – we want children to gain some specific knowledge of the Romans as well as a broad overview.

 

Knowledge is sequenced and mapped deliberately and coherently. Beyond the knowledge specified for each unit, our knowledge-rich curriculum is planned vertically and horizontally.

 

Knowledge is taught to be remembered, not merely encountered. Our curriculum is not simply a set of encounters – it is designed to be remembered in detail to be stored in students’ long-term memory. This will be built on later, forming ever wider and deeper schema.