Great Place to Learn

A Great Place to Learn is where we maximise all available resources to enable children to learn, teachers to teach and parents to support. The culture of learning is deep rooted across the entire organisation for our pupils, our workforce and our community.

Our aim is to ensure that children at our academies experience the best educational provision beginning with excellence in the Early Years Foundation Stage. We believe that school should be a place where every child achieves and makes progress in their learning across the whole curriculum over time. We know that parents are the single most influential factor in children’s outcomes and that we need to prioritise even further the need to support parents to support their children’s education. Every child has the entitlement to an inclusive curriculum, and we strive to ensure that disadvantage and additional needs do not act as barriers to learning and achievement. We aim for all our children to succeed both academically and socially, ready for the next phase of their learning and beyond as responsible and respectful citizens.

The Harmony Trust core values underpin everything we do. 

Respect and acceptance, honesty and integrity, compassion and kindness, resilience and responsibility, co-operation and collaboration, aspiration and motivation.

Believe, Achieve, Succeed

Each academy has the autonomy to carefully plan and design a bespoke curriculum offer to best meet the needs of the community it serves. They have the responsibility to define their curriculum intent incorporating the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum, however the following principles apply across our trust.

Design principles that provide a framework for all of our Academies: 

• Relevant, considering children’s interests, varied, inclusive, context appropriate

• National curriculum coverage, age appropriate, challenge and high expectations

• First-hand practical enrichments & wider opportunities

• Communication, language and literacy is the golden thread that runs throughout the curriculum

• Reading is prioritised from an early stage including the teaching of phonics within and around the curriculum

• Fluency, problem solving and reasoning to enable application 

• Life skills and character development 

• Developing self-regulating learners

• Opportunities to experience success in different subjects & different skills and to share their learning with others

• Effective use of resources & technology to enhance learning opportunities 

• Informed by evidence, research and pedagogy

Deep rooted in all learning is quality first teaching interlinked with high quality provision delivered by highly skilled practitioners. Expert leaders guide the teaching of knowledge, skills and conceptual understanding, shaped by the needs of our children.   We believe that investment in high quality professional development is the single most factor in enabling high quality teaching that leads to improved outcomes for all. We also believe that the real value of being a multi-academy trust is to create opportunities for our staff to learn with, from and on behalf of others in truly effective collaboration.

We prioritise the essential skills of communication, reading, writing and maths to allow access to the wider curriculum. Knowledge, skills and conceptual understanding is carefully combined to ensure sequence and progression in learning. Lessons are planned to ensure memorable learning. Assessment is used to inform the teaching sequence and to ensure all children make progress.

We believe our curriculum must ignite a passion for lifelong learning for all our pupils. The curriculum will provide the cultural capital to ensure our pupils will be skilled communicators as active global citizens for today and tomorrow. The curriculum sensitively reflects local context, history and culture and takes a local to global approach.

Through ‘The Harmony Pledge’ all academies provide different opportunities to develop our character competencies and raise aspirations. The Harmony Pledge aims to broaden children’s experiences and aspirations in order to enable children to become lifelong learners who can always BELIEVE, ACHIEVE, and SUCCEED.

Children have the knowledge, skills, attitudes and aspirations to succeed in school and beyond. They are aspirational, confident, resilient, tolerant, creative, effective communicators, self-motivated, cooperative, honest and able to solve problems. Children know how to be physically and mentally healthy and how to keep themselves safe.

Through the “Read, Achieve, Succeed” strategy, teachers are expert in the teaching of reading and children develop as confident, skilled and fluent readers who choose to read both for pleasure and learning.

As a result of the curriculum, children believe in themselves, achieve in their learning and succeed in life.