Curriculum Gateways Rationale:
Within the Gosforth Schools Trust (GST), transition from Year 4 to Year 5 marks a critical juncture in a child's educational journey.
To ensure an effective progression and smooth transition between first and middle school, it is crucial to have established clear curriculum end-points that delineate the knowledge, skills, and competencies pupils should attain by the end of Year 4.
Our Curriculum Gateways document has been established and agreed through effective collaboration between the GST’s 9 first schools and 2 middle schools. Leaders at all levels, including middle leaders and subject specialists, have contributed to the design and implementation of this document.
Foundation Subjects have been broken down into specific strands of disciplinary knowledge. This means that subject-specific skills, which build sequentially alongside substantive knowledge acquisition, can be defined and worked towards progressively. In practice, this means that all GST schools retain ownership of the content of their subject curriculums (‘what’ they are teaching) whilst working towards the same disciplinary goals. For example, pupils in one school could be learning about Ancient Egypt while another studies Ancient Greece but children in both settings could be exploring the reliability of physical historical evidence.
The impact of this agreed curriculum relationship is that children are able to ‘hit the ground running’ following their transition into Middle School.
First School teachers know the ambitious end-points which they need their pupils to secure and deepen by the end of Year 4.
Middle School teachers can confidently re-visit and build on the competencies of pupils beginning their journey into Upper Key Stage 2, with less variation between feeder schools.
