Please note: this guidance is taken from the Maestro Helpcentre for England, but may provide some context and detail for schools in Wales who are intending to use some of the knowledge-rich projects (KRPs) within their own bespoke curriculum.
At Cornerstones Education, we aim to make curriculum products that support equality, diversity and inclusion. This document highlights how Cornerstones' support for equality, diversity and inclusion is implemented.
Our ethos and standards
In all our content and products, we:
- Use non-gendered language such as ‘firefighter’ or ‘postal worker’ instead of ‘fireman’ or ‘postman’.Use a range of diverse imagery in resources, including people of different ethnicities and abilities and various family groupings.
- Use the term ‘parents and carers’ in lesson planning to cover all adults that care for children, rather than ‘mum and dad’.
- Choose curriculum content that reflects a diverse range of people, places and times, including modern Britain.
- Understand the importance of protected characteristics.
- Create ambitious, well-designed resources suitable for children in each year group that deliver learning clearly and take account of cognitive load.
The curriculum
The Equality, diversity and inclusion statement (Ofsted, May 2019) states that equality in education is based on all children having access to the same, high-quality curriculum. The Cornerstones Curriculum offers all children the opportunity to engage with a broad, balanced and ambitious curriculum, covering the national curriculum subjects of history, geography, science, art and DT and providing access to curriculum resources for maths, English, computing and RE. The content of the curriculum enables all children to learn a critical bank of essential knowledge, including knowledge about a wide range of diverse places, people and times.
In addition to the curriculum, additional resources, such as weekly assemblies and Democracy Rules projects, promote the principles of RSHE and FBV. Skills statements for RSHE are also provided. Teachers can use the skills statements to create their own lessons and projects to suit the needs of their community, school and children.
Curriculum Maestro
In addition to the curriculum itself, the tools available on Curriculum Maestro allow teachers to adapt and customise the curriculum to suit the diverse needs of learners. Actual curriculum coverage enables effective monitoring of what has been taught, allowing schools to make sure access to the curriculum is equal to all.