The Excellence Curriculum: Developing a curriculum that is knowledge-rich, builds skills and is underpinned by how children learn

Designing a new curriculum involves striking a crucial balance between subject knowledge, core skills and how children actually learn. In our Hackney primary school, that is precisely what we are doing, along with developing teacher’s understanding and application of cognitive science so that we are building ‘a school within a school’.   Excellence for Students To attempt to achieve this balance, we decided to construct a thematic curriculum, The Excellence Curriculum, for a new academic year. The whole school focuses on one ‘theme’ throughout a half-term, with ‘subthemes’ per year group, ranging from: World History, to Brilliant Britons, to Diverse De Beauvoir. Staff select a ‘Golden Thread Question’ to run through the core of the theme to frame the subject and ensure that the theme is taught in a sequential and coherent way. From this, staff then decide on content that must be taught and assessed across the theme. For example, rather than just studying a