Cragside Primary School

Cragside Primary school is a two-form entry primary school in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne. At Cragside, we aim to provide children with an education that: inspires and nurtures; celebrates individuality and diversity; and equips every child to make a positive contribution to their community. In short, we aim to provide children with an education that will change the world for the better! We are fortunate to work with wonderful children at Cragside, who are also part of a diverse, loving and supportive school community, including children, staff and families.

We applied for the Rethinking Curriculum project because we wanted explore how we could develop our curriculum and pedagogy further to allow all voices in our school to be heard. For us, this meant equipping children with the skills they needed to speak with confidence within a strong and authentic listening culture. We also wanted to ensure that curriculum development was a collaborative process, with each staff member playing their own part as a Primary professional within the Rethinking journey.

We were thrilled to have been accepted as part of the project, and to benefit from working alongside the Chartered College, associates and our peers. An integral aspect of this has been working with our co-creator, Rachel Higginson, who has supported us in thinking as a whole staff team about how we build in opportunities for authentic oracy. Rachel’s work led us to dedicate a lot of time and space in school this year into re-planning our curriculum together as a team. This has included looking at both what we wanted to keep, and also what we wanted to take out of our humanities and science curriculum!

Rethinking Curriculum has given us the agency and confidence to build an oracy-rich approach to learning.

Cragside Primary School

From this we have begun to look for where we can create opportunities in these areas for deep, meaningful talk. Rachel has also helped us to think about on how we can we enhance our environment and codify the social norms within our classrooms which allow talk to happen and develop.

Throughout this first part of the project, we have felt supported, validated and challenged by Rachel, the Chartered College and by their research team at UCL. It has been a very exciting time for us as a school to be given the opportunity to co-create a curriculum underpinned by the expertise of the Rethinking partnership and with a focus on Primary. The support of our peers within the process has also been invaluable – school development can sometimes feel like a lonely place – but the network has always felt supportive.  

Rethinking Curriculum has given us the agency and confidence to build an oracy-rich approach to learning which values and hears the voice of every child in our school: an education that will change the world for the better!