At Salisbury Road Primary School, we are proud to put the children at the centre of everything we do. Our compassionate team are committed to providing opportunities of growth for those who pass through our gates and for all children to have an array of enriching experiences to inspire a life-long love of learning. We are very fortunate that our school is at the heart of the community and our Learning Academies Trust curriculum, which was co-created by subject leaders throughout the eight schools, has evolved to reflect this ensuring that the community’s needs are being addressed through the ambitious education that we offer. Our increasingly diverse curriculum celebrates difference and fosters a greater understanding of others through the teaching of acceptance and empathy. Our school values, alongside our comprehensive PSHE programme of study, are two key threads that run through our curriculum uniting us as a school community and empowering our students to become responsible, rounded citizens who are well-prepared for life in modern Britain.

Our knowledge-rich curriculum, primarily based on the National Curriculum, has been heavily influenced by our local area and the history that surrounds the school and the city of Plymouth ensuring content is both relevant and accessible yet also broadens horizons and raises the aspirations of our pupils. Geography and History, along with the core subjects, are key drivers for our curriculum and we are passionate about providing a varied and diverse range of enrichment opportunities to bring our curriculum to life making it all the more memorable and enjoyable for our children as well as maximising opportunities to use the children’s community, heritage and traditions as a hook into their learning.

As a staff, we share the genuine belief that everyone is entitled to an outstanding education no matter of their circumstances and our welcoming and inclusive school community follows a curriculum based upon current research on cognitive science so that it allows our pupils to know more, understand more and do more. Knowledge and skills are taught in a progressive manner through a spiral curriculum to ensure coverage and provide opportunities to revisit key concepts in every discipline, making and building on links to support the transfer of information into the long- term memory and encouraging deep thinking and enquiring minds.

Further tailoring of our curriculum, addressing the needs of our community, has meant that we have placed Oracy at our core recognising the importance of these skills and how they impact on life chances and opportunities. Through these strong foundations based around talk, a love of words and reading is instilled in our pupils enabling them to access a broad and balanced range of subjects that support the development of the whole child and promote a positive attitude to learning.

Our day-to-day curriculum is enriched through an extensive range of clubs which run during lunchtimes and after school. We have a dedicated, specialist PE assistant who has created a varied timetable of sporting clubs from multi-skills to netball which are always over-subscribed and these clubs work to engage children in a variety of sports that they often then have the opportunity to compete across the city in earning us The Active Schools Award. Not all clubs are sports-based and they do change on a termly basis allowing us to offer experiences from origami to boom whackers and science club to Spanish! Salisbury Road is part of the Children’s University, so we fully encourage children to attend clubs both inside and outside of school and celebrate this through the issuing of the Children’s University Passports and their stamping. Music is enriched through a specialist music teacher who visits the school weekly and provides individual music lessons as well as working with whole cohorts teaching a variety of instruments. As well as this, our strong links with our local secondary school enables us to offer further opportunities where children and staff work together in musicals and performances. This secondary school link extends through the whole curriculum where our work is enriched with workshops, trips and the sharing of knowledge and expertise in all subjects.

Our curriculum spreads far beyond our school and community and we are proud to have strong links across the globe with our colleagues in Cape Town, South Africa, with whom we have been working with via the British Council for a number of years and has led to our work being recognised with the achievement of the International School Award. We continue to build relationships with colleagues further afield as we begin our work on the Erasmus Programme linking with schools across Europe.

At Salisbury Road, we are proud to say that our curriculum is not the finished article and since its creation and adoption it has already evolved. This will only continue as we are yet to have a complete school year where our curriculum has been taught. As our school community changes with the changing demographic of the city, our curriculum will continue to be evaluated and refined. Additionally, as the needs of our children change due to worldwide influences and external factors, so will our curriculum. Through constant evaluation and development of our understanding of how children learn we know that what we offer our pupils will be the best and lead to positive outcomes for all.