Our Curriculum

Our aim, here at Riverside, is a bold one – we want to change the world by nurturing and inspiring every individual in our care.
The children at Riverside will grow up and move on to the next stage of their education. They will go out into the wider world and we want to inspire them to see that they really can make a difference in that world. We will help nurture a character centred on integrity, kindness and respect in all their interactions with others.

It takes courage to live life like this, to be a dynamic individual who dares to live each day to the full. You need to learn to be resilient, embrace mistakes and to bounce back. We feel that this best happens when a child feels nurtured with a supportive learning environment – a safe place where they can flourish, and this is what we provide at Riverside. We provide the children with opportunities to develop a life-long love of learning.

If you feel that this is somewhere that your child can flourish, please get in touch so we can show you the school in action. 

To find out about our curriculum in more detail, click on the subject links tabs or please contact us at schooloffice@rs.starmat.uk or call 01937 832899.

Growth mindset: There are two ways of looking at the world:

If you try hard and learn from your mistakes, you will make progress. That’s growth mindset in a nutshell. It sounds so obvious you would think that every teacher, every parent and every human being would be able to work this out for themselves, without decades of educational research and of course you’re right, it’s common sense.

So what is revolutionary about growth mindset? Don’t we all inherently understand and agree with the logic and the theory?

Well we may agree wholeheartedly with the headlines, but the truth is that our language and our behaviour can accidently reinforce the opposite of growth mindset in our children or those we teach.

For example, have you ever asked your child if they came top in something, or asked them where they came in the class or group? Have you ever offered rewards for reaching a set goal? Have you ever told your child how brilliant they are for finishing something quickly or with little effort?

All of these questions suggest or reinforce to a child that what matters to you, the most important influence in their lives, is making things look easy and beating others. Children who hear language like this often have extremely fragile self-esteem because they are worried that at any moment someone could do better than them, or a task could be too difficult for them to complete. If their self-esteem is closely tied with looking clever without effort, school can become a pretty threatening place.

Some children will give up, others will play up, because if it’s obvious they aren’t trying then no-one can say they can’t, they can only say they won’t. Others will just try to hide and hope they are never asked a question or put in a situation where there is any chance of failure. It makes no difference how high achieving children are, anyone can suffer from a fixed mindset. Anyone can be constantly worried about being ‘found out’ by their peers, their teachers or their parents, which will inhibit their learning.

So, growth mindset tells us that if we try hard and learn from our mistakes, we will make good progress. If we, as parents and teachers, use language that reinforces the idea that success can be measured by how many others a child beats in a test or how quickly and easily they can reach a successful outcome, those children will never be comfortable with failure, and this is an important part of the learning process.

Being brave enough to take a risk, to try something that is not guaranteed to succeed, to fail, to pick yourself up again, to learn lessons from the failure and to try again with new knowledge and understanding are character traits that we at Riverside Primary School consider to be vital in order to develop into a happy and successful person who can thrive in our rapidly changing world.

This belief in certain traits is where our school values, the PRIDE of Riverside, come from. They are a tangible way for us to teach and develop growth mindset strategies to the children.

Assessment

“The individualization of learning fundamentally redefines the role of assessment.” – Sebastian Thrun

At Riverside, we place significant emphasis on the role accurate assessment plays in children’s learning. Teachers use assessment for learning strategies, which enable them to establish how well, and in what ways, a child is learning. The purpose of assessment is to ensure teachers understand what the next steps in learning are for groups and individuals, so that lessons, the curriculum and environments can be adapted to support this.

As a school, we believe in mastery for all, but all learning is adapted to meet the needs of the individual pupils. Children are expected to share responsibility for their learning and for ensuring that they are working at the right level of challenge. Learning must provide children with the opportunity to consolidate knowledge or be challenged to make the next aspirational step.

All areas of the school curriculum are adapted to meet the needs and interests of groups and individuals. Daily, there are pre-teaching and same day intervention groups to ensure that no children are left behind and that, where appropriate, children are challenged to attain at a greater depth.

All children will receive feedback on their learning. This could be verbal or written and it could be given during or after a session. The level of detail in which this is done requires the teacher to use their professional judgement in terms of the age/stage of the child, their own workload, but most importantly, the potential impact it will have in supporting the child to progress.

The school has developed marking systems which we believe clearly identify what children have done well and what the next learning step should be, for children at different ages and stages.

Children respond to marking as soon as possible, from when they are set. Educational research shows that the more immediate the feedback, the more impactful it is.