Subjects in the Cornerstones Curriculum

Subjects in the Cornerstones Curriculum

The Cornerstones Curriculum is a fully sequenced and connected curriculum that spans from Nursery to Year 6. This curriculum helps you to meet requirements set out in the national curriculum and Ofsted Inspection Framework, enabling children to build knowledge and understanding over time, while offering rich, broad and engaging content.

Why doesn’t the model include other subjects such as PE, music and MFL?

Currently, the Cornerstones Curriculum does not include the subjects of PE, music and MFL. This is because many schools already have specialist schemes in place that support the teaching of these subjects.

The Cornerstones skills and knowledge framework can be used by schools to map their own music, PE and other subject coverage across the curriculum and lessons from previous projects can be used to provide music coverage.

We are investigating options for music and when these are complete, we will be able to provide you with further support for these subjects. Many of our schools use Charanga for their music provision. However, you may wish to contact your local music hub for further support.

Our RE projects, Love to Celebrate, provide additional teaching guidance and resources for all schools on the teaching of world religions. Due to each local authority setting their own agreed syllabus in line with Standing Advisory Council for Religious Education (SACRE), RE cannot be sequenced within the model. We have, however, placed the projects in our Cornerstones Curriculum overview to match the time of year the relevant celebrations occur within each project. These may be adjusted as required.

InfoThere is a handbook located in the Resources>Generic folder, within each RE project, that explains more about how to use the projects in more detail.

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Barefoot, Computing at School

Cornerstones has a partnership with Barefoot, Computing at School to provide schools with the ability to deliver the computing curriculum with downloadable lessons and resources, mapped to the Cornerstones skills and knowledge framework.  Barefoot makes computing easy to teach and fun to learn, with or without a computer and teaches children about the use of technology, how to stay safe online and programming skills .

The Barefoot lessons have been  sequenced and grouped into projects for each year group, to make adding them to your curriculum easier.  We would advise teaching the Staying safe online lesson at the beginning of the year, but where you choose to teach the remaining lessons can be completely flexible to your own timetable. Where appropriate, links to Cornerstones projects have been made in individual lessons.

Adding the projects to your curriculum, along with the content from some of our projects, will give you full coverage of the national curriculum programmes of study and strong coverage of the Cornerstones skills and knowledge framework. There are a few areas of the Cornerstones' framework that are not covered, including use of sensors and uses of some software and hardware.

These could easily be covered through combining lessons with DT and science, as well as general use of computing, such as sending emails, using programs such as Microsoft Office and using devices such as digital cameras, scanners or data loggers.

AlertYou will need to register on the Barefoot website and create an account to download the resources. This can be created free of charge. Barefoot also offer online guides and CPD workshops.

Further reading

What is the Cornerstones Curriculum?
  1. Why should we use the Cornerstones Curriculum?
  2. Inspecting the Cornerstones Curriculum?
  3. What do I need to show to an inspector during an inspection?
  4. How does the Cornerstones Curriculum ensure that children make progress?
  5. Evidence-informed learning - A summary guide to cognitive science in Curriculum 22
  6. Curriculum 22 - An adaptable, ambitious primary curriculum - informed by the science of learning
  7. Curriculum Maestro - A smart online platform that helps you design, develop, teach, assess and lead your curriculum

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