Your curriculum
The curriculum your school creates can be as bespoke as you want it to be. The following information will discuss this in more depth.
The Cwricwlwm designer enables you to design your own curriculum for the needs of your school. Your curriculum can be constructed using the projects available to you in Cwricwlwm Maestro, and can also include projects that you create yourself. When you're ready to start creating your curriculum, you can find instructions here: Creating your curriculum.
You may also wish to use one of our prepopulated curriculum models. We have designed these models by looking at the curriculum journey that children will take over their time in primary education, and have chosen projects to provide the broad and balanced curriculum that all children deserve whilst ensuring the best progression and coverage possible.
Schools will approach this task in various ways, but below are some of the most frequently used methods.
- Use a Cornerstones curriculum model, which has been designed with the best progression and coverage possible.
- Ask teachers to choose and favourite the projects that they would like to teach.
- Leaders choose the projects that they would like to be taught.
- As a staff, view and compare the projects and choose those that most closely match the existing curriculum.
Choose from the range of projects available on Cwricwlwm Maestro, such as Imaginative Learning, Knowledge-rich Projects, Love to Investigate science investigations and projects that the school has created (read more about project types). The different types of projects can be used in the construction of your curriculum and schools do not need to limit themselves to just one type. This is one of the ways that schools can create a curriculum that reflects the needs of their context and aims.
Note that whichever method is used to select and construct the curriculum, and which projects/combination of projects have been chosen, leaders will need to carry out checks using the tools in Maestro to ensure that the curriculum matches the school’s aims, has coverage of the Curriculum for Wales (if required) and is coherent, broad and balanced. Read more here: Checking curriculum coverage and progression.
Once you have chosen your projects, the tools within the Cwricwlwm designer can be used to check that the intended curriculum has a coherent narrative across AoLEs, statements of what matters and year groups. Potential gaps should be identified and discussed using these tools and changes made to project selections where necessary. AoLE leaders may wish to investigate the coverage, progression and gaps in their own AoLEs. They can do this at the AoLE/year group level, or at the AoLE/aspect level.
Questions that may be useful to prompt these discussions include:
- Have we created a sensible, coherent journey in all subjects across the year groups?
- Do we have any gaps and, if so, how will we resolve them?
Solutions can include changing project choices, assigning gaps to existing projects and creating your own projects.
- Do AoLE leaders know what aspects of their AoLE are being covered in the intended curriculum, in which year groups and through which projects?
- Do teachers know what they are responsible for teaching in their own class? Do they know which statement of what matters, skills and knowledge have been taught in the previous year group, and which will be taught in the next year group?
Ready to create your curriculum? Next step: Cwricwlwm designer
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