Expeditionary Learning Design
Woodchurch Road Academy: How Our Curriculum Works
1. Our Curriculum Intent
Our curriculum is designed to empower every child to achieve academic excellence, produce beautiful work, and develop quality character.
It provides both breadth and depth, ensuring full coverage of the National Curriculum while making learning meaningful, connected, and relevant to children’s lives and the wider world.
Through our projects, we aim to nurture informed, compassionate, and active citizens who recognise their agency to make a difference.
2. Curriculum Structure
Our curriculum is carefully structured to ensure progression, coherence, and richness of experience across every subject and year group.
a. National Curriculum Coverage
All subjects meet and exceed the expectations of the National Curriculum. Each subject has a clear progression map, outlining knowledge, skills, and vocabulary from EYFS to Year 6. This ensures learning builds cumulatively and consistently across the school.
b. Year Group Progression Maps
Each subject’s progression map is translated into year group overviews, which identify what children will learn, how this connects to prior learning, and what this prepares them for next. This sequencing ensures deep learning and prevents superficial coverage.
3. Project-Based Learning
Learning is organised into 12-week cross-curricular projects, each driven by a guiding question and culminating in a final product or presentation. These projects connect disciplines around powerful themes that inspire curiosity, creativity, and social action.
Each project brings together:
Core disciplinary knowledge from the National Curriculum
Authentic contexts that link learning to the real world
Opportunities for reflection, critique, and public presentation
4. Our Key Drivers
Our curriculum is shaped by two layers of drivers: Learning Drivers and Social Drivers. Together, they ensure that every child grows as both a powerful learner and a responsible global citizen.
Learning Drivers
Academic Excellence – ensuring every child masters essential knowledge and skills, and understands how to think, question, and apply learning at depth.
Character – developing habits of kindness, perseverance, and moral purpose that enable children to lead and collaborate with integrity.
Beautiful Work – fostering pride, craftsmanship, and creativity through a culture of drafting, critique, and improvement.
Social Drivers
Social Injustice – understanding inequality and taking informed, compassionate action to promote fairness and equity.
Belonging and Identity – exploring who we are, where we come from, and how we connect to others and our community.
Climate Emergency – understanding the interdependence of people and planet, and taking responsibility for sustainable living.
These six drivers shape every project’s design, ensuring that learning is both academically rigorous and socially conscious.
5. Experts and Expeditions
Every project is enhanced through expert engagement and authentic experiences:
Experts (e.g. scientists, artists, activists, historians) deepen disciplinary understanding and provide aspirational role models.
Expeditions (educational visits, fieldwork, and community engagement) give children first-hand experiences of the world beyond the classroom and connect learning to lived realities.
These experiences make learning memorable, purposeful, and inspiring.
6. Project Plans
Each 12-week project is captured in a Project Plan, which outlines:
The guiding question and project purpose
National Curriculum coverage and subject links
Key milestones and learning outcomes
Core texts and resources
Experts, expeditions, and fieldwork
Assessment and feedback protocols aligned with our Formative Feedback Policy
7. Gantt Charts
Teachers translate the Project Plan into a Gantt Chart to map the week-by-week sequence of learning. This includes:
Subject integration and progression
Timing of expert visits, expeditions, and public showcases
Feedback and improvement checkpoints
Preparation for the final product or performance
This approach ensures projects are well-paced, coherent, and purposeful from start to finish.
8. Reflection and Refinement
At the end of each project, teachers and pupils reflect on:
Curriculum coverage and depth of learning
The quality and craftsmanship of final outcomes
The effectiveness of expert and expedition experiences
The project’s impact on pupils’ understanding of social injustice, belonging and identity, and the climate emergency
This review process ensures our curriculum remains ambitious, evolving, and true to our mission — to empower every child to learn well, live wisely, and make a positive difference.
