by Alex Neophitou.
There are many curriculum packages out there that you can buy into as a school, such as websites and schemes of learning, specific planning resources, and platforms that offer teaching resources for aspects of lessons, either whole or in parts. There is always a cost involved, whether a £7.99 per month subscription for an individual or a whole-school package that costs thousands. If you are a school investing in such a resource, you want to know if it is worth the outlay. We are all aware of the tight budgets that schools face, and if you are going to purchase something, it must be right for your school!
I deliver free demos of the Learning Challenge Curriculum regularly, and people are often surprised that it is only £750 per year for planning and resources, giving you a complete history, geography and science curriculum alongside further resources for developing an excellent Art and DT curriculum. Not only that, but all the resources are downloadable and editable, meaning you can make them your own. Now, when you are talking about designing a great curriculum for your school, being able to put your stamp on it is crucial for your children! It's also a set of resources that would cost more than £3000 if purchased separately.
The question I'm often asked is, why do we price it so reasonably?
The answer to this question is simple. When Clive Davies first started Focus Education (over 30 years ago), he set out to do all he could to support schools on their development journeys. As he continued working with schools and creating resources for them to use, he decided to pull them all together and create the Learning Challenge Curriculum, designed with a straightforward goal: to realise Clive's vision of supporting schools by creating a curriculum that works.
While there is nothing to stop schools from signing up for a year and downloading everything, current members of the Learning Challenge community will tell you about the updates and new resources being developed and added to constantly.
This year alone has seen some fantastic developments. First, we completely revamped our mixed-age planning, so rather than simply giving you a few suggested ideas, we have created a complete curriculum involving an A and B cycle for history, geography and science. Progressions for substantive and disciplinary knowledge and vocabulary overviews follow the mixed-age structure.
We've also completely revamped our history and geography areas by signposting you to the 'golden threads' within the Learning Challenge Curriculum. These have become a key feature of the LCC, and all the feedback has been positive. We've also reviewed our progression mapping and added some great new units of learning to ensure that schools have choices around how they cover the National Curriculum in the best way for their children.
We are also very excited about the additional resources we have created for subject leaders and teachers. There are now two forms of pupil voice templates: the more generic format and a knowledge retention snapshot format aimed at year 2 and years 5/6 to assess the knowledge that children can remember. For history, we've created timelines for each year group and a set of world maps for geography. These can be used to support children with recalling prior knowledge and collecting new knowledge.
And why are we adding all of this? We want schools to feel supported with their curriculum development and know we have their back! Why is our price so competitive? We want schools to be able to afford to subscribe to the Learning Challenge Curriculum as we continue to develop and enhance it. As I said, schools could sign up for a year and then leave, but they would miss out on all the exciting developments that are about to come!
We've just completed updating the LCC website and are already discussing what will come next. I want to examine how we can bring the 'golden threads' into science. We are also looking at ways of bringing real-life scenarios into the Learning Challenge Curriculum and could have something special with links to PSHE put together early next year. These are just a few of the things we will be working on that will make the subscription worthwhile for our schools. We'll be looking at other things, like developing new units and components, and I haven't mentioned our #PrimaryHistoryBites yet! I've loved making the first four, and I have plans to make several more, including versions my 9-year-old daughter will voiceover so that all children can access them. I want to go further and create #PrimaryGeographyBites and potentially explore other curriculum areas, too!
The name 'Learning Challenge Curriculum' has been around for several years, but in its current form, we are only just starting. If you're already part of the Learning Challenge community, stick around, and we'll support you with all the resources you need. If you're not signed up yet, maybe it's time you checked us out to see what your school and children could be a part of!
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