CURRICULUM

Our Curriculum at Soudley School

‘Respect for Ourselves, Each Other and The Environment’

Key Drivers

Our key drivers underpin our provision and curriculum. We want children to strive to reach their full potential and understand the unique and diverse heritage that surrounds them within our forest. Soudley’s key drivers are:

Our Forest, Communication, Knowledge and Understanding of the World

Our experienced subject leaders work across the schools, ensuring that the curriculum is rich and of a high standard. This is unique to our federation and is very effective. Good practice is celebrated and we can share resources and hold joint sessions/trips throughout the year, so that children meet a wider group of children and make friends.

Click here for our Subject Leader structure: Subject Leaders 2024_25

Communication starts from EYFS and creates the foundation for our children to become successful members of the community; we want to provide children with opportunities to do this effectively in a range of ways. We want our children to have a rich knowledge of the world around them so that they able to draw upon this within school and beyond.

Curriculum Intent

UNICEF Rights of a Child Article 29

Education must develop every child’s personality, talents and abilities to the full. It must encourage the child’s respect for human rights, as well as respect for their parents, their own and other cultures and environments.

At Soudley School, we are embedding our broad, balanced curriculum which provides children with a range of learning experiences. We want our children to leave our school able to make a positive contribution to their communities and to understand the world and their place within it. 

Our curriculum is based on the National Curriculum and exposes the children to the world outside of their immediate experiences. 

Experiential learning and knowledge is at the core of our curriculum, with a strong focus on developing the vocabulary of every child. This links to our progression documents and our Key Drivers – Our Forest, Communication, Knowledge and Understanding of the World.

We have carefully considered and planned for how the curriculum is set out from Early Years to Year Six. 

Rainbow Progress

For each appropriate foundation subject, rainbow colours show our intended progression of skills, starting with white for pre-school then going through from red to violet over the national curriculum years. This sets out an overview of our aims for that subject by the time children leave in Year 6 and you can see these in a separate tab.

Key learning by year group 

For the core subjects of reading, writing and mathematics, the learning is taught in line with year group/key stage phase objectives. We have re-designed our long term curriculum from 2022 onwards, so please click on the links below. 

Long term curriculum plans can be seen below. 2024-5 is Year A on the KS1 rolling programme, and Year C on the KS2 plan.

Please see the document below called ‘Overview of Subjects’ for details about each subject taught.

Reading and Writing is mainly taught through literacy units based on high quality children’s books. Examples are Meerkat Mail by Emily Gravett, The Iron Man by Ted Hughes and Island of The Blue Dolphins by Scott O’Dell. Please see our Phonics page for details of Essential Letters and Sounds. 

Maths is taught mainly through Can Do Maths and we follow a mastery approach as part of GlowMaths Hub.Maths overview

R.E. We follow Gloucestershire’s Agreed Syllabus for Religious Education. The principal aim of religious education is to explore what people believe and what difference this makes to how they live, so that pupils can gain the knowledge, understanding and skills needed to handle questions raised by religion and belief, reflecting on their own ideas and ways of living.

PSHE is taught through SCARF and myhappyminds.

Equality and Inclusion

We want all our children to thrive-please see our policies section for further information.

Please contact the school if you would like further information about our curriculum.