The wider curriculum and Lighting up Learning 

(Developing Curiosity)

Our wider curriculum architecture has been developed in partnership with Lighting up Learning. This is still in its infancy and is built around a local, bespoke version of their Curious-city^TM approach to learning. This aims to inspires and guide our teachers to create a curriculum that links to our community, environment and children’s experiences.

This approach is also built around using questioning as a stimulus to develop knowledge and understanding from a skeleton of learning opportunities provided by the Curious City framework. 

By doing this we aim to ensures that our curriculum is:

• Progressively planned and matched to the National Curriculum 2014 and cognitive development.
• Exposes learners to the wider world in carefully planned steps.

Because we want our curriculum to be owned by the St Mary's children and teachers, the Curious City framework meets our curriculum intent objectives by providing just enough guidance whilst enabling teachers to inspire learners with relevant starting points linked to local people, places and stories.

This structure also has plenty of room to respond to our ever changing world.

As outlined above, over the next year, our school enquiries will be shaped by us but with the support of Lighting up Learning and a family of local schools who are also using this approach.

This means our curriculum will be unique but not isolated: we are part of a family of curious, enquiry-led settings and collaborate regularly at learner, teacher and leader level.

To find out more about our approach, please select the following links:

• How we implement the enquiry-led approach
• How the curious approach links to cognitive development
• Why our approach is more than just the national curriculum

Explore the subjects of our Curriculum