At Foxfield Primary School, we provide inclusive learning experiences for every stage of a child’s development. Our approach is underpinned by our attachment and trauma-informed ethos, where we create safe, structured, and predictable spaces that allow all children to flourish. We are committed to ensuring that high-quality adaptive teaching, live feedback, and relational care remove barriers to learning so that starting points never limit a pupil’s potential. We believe that all learners are capable of academic excellence and personal growth, and we design our curriculum to make this a reality.

Relationships are at the heart of everything we do. We believe that collaborative learning not only supports academic growth but also builds character and strengthens peer relationships. Through carefully crafted learning sequences, pupils are immersed in active learning that promotes problem-solving, critical thinking, connection-making, debate, reasoning, and evaluation. Throughout the school day, children are engaged, thoughtful participants in their learning. This deep level of engagement helps them develop a strong sense of ownership, purpose, and connection to their learning and to one another.

Early Years Foundation Stage: Early Excellence

In the Early Years, we build secure foundations in language, communication, and early literacy within a language-rich environment. Our curriculum prioritises oracy and vocabulary development, utilising our structured Oracy Framework to build children’s confidence. Children learn through a balanced mixture of structured adult-led sessions and high-quality continuous provision, both indoors and outdoors.

Play-based collaborative interactions and exciting, hands-on provocations such as exploring in the potion station, digging for treasure in the sandpit, or developing a curiosity for the natural world in our forest school, are designed purposefully to develop independence, curiosity, and early mathematical reasoning. Meticulous, early diagnostic profiling ensures that children with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) receive timely, targeted support, while our rigorous Little Wandle phonics programme gets every child reading from the very beginning of their journey.  

Key Stage 1: Securing strong foundations

In Key Stage 1, we secure a smooth and worry-free start to formal learning through carefully planned, shared-responsibility transitions. Our teachers track essential developmental milestones like pencil grip, sitting stamina, and phonetic Grapheme-Phoneme Correspondence (GPC) knowledge, ensuring no progress is lost as pupils move to more formal desks.

Oracy remains at the heart of our curriculum, with daily active sessions encouraging children to articulate their thinking, compose sentences orally, and expand their vocabulary. The curriculum is kept highly ambitious and broad, enriched by trips, visits, and real-world experiences. We eliminate cognitive overload by focusing on core transcription mechanics, daily handwriting practice, and a daily number fluency session that secures rapid retrieval of fundamental number facts.

Key Stage 2: Attainment and ambition

In Key Stage 2, children develop the maturity, character, and academic stamina required for a successful transition to secondary school. Our pupils grow into confident, articulate, and compassionate global citizens who actively contribute to their community and the wider world. Placing relationships and mutual respect at the heart of our practice, we use collaborative learning and Kagan structures to help children master complex skills.

We explicitly teach cognitive strategies and critical thinking tools, such as ‘Why-Why-Why Chains’ to identify root causes and the ‘Opinion Continuum’ to debate and explore diverse viewpoints. Through our ambitious Inspire Global Curriculum, learning is sequenced to encourage long-term retention, reasoning, and evaluation. Our curriculum is further enriched by social action projects, which empower pupils to apply their knowledge as active change makers in their local communities, turning deep understanding into meaningful, real-world impact.