At Stalyhill Infant School we have developed our curriculum over a number of years and we work hard to continually evaluate and evolve our provision and practice, to meet both the changing and varied needs of the cohorts of learners that come through our school, and the changing needs of the wider community. We believe firmly that our learners should not be expected to fit into any box of our creation but that instead we should alter and amend our offer to children to ensure that their needs continue to be well met.

As the only Infant School in Tameside, we are in a unique position and one that enables us to have a sharp focus on EYFS and KS1 education and develop these as areas of expertise. We are a school that firmly believes that learning in the Early Years and KS1 should be, where possible, through play. It should be investigative, practical, hands-on, exploratory, multi-sensory and fun and we aim to provide our learners with a wide range of experiences and opportunities to enable them to discover and cultivate their own strengths, passions and interests.

We also recognise, and take very seriously, our responsibility to prepare children for the next stage of their education and to begin their journey as 'learners for life'. For this reason we have a clear and continual focus on the development of language skills, early reading and reading for pleasure, and a focus on learners' understanding of number. We have high expectations for all our learners and ensure that we send them to their KS2 settings fully equipped to tackle this next phase of education.

At Stalyhill Infant School our learners follow the National Curriculum and develop skills and knowledge in the full range of core and foundation subjects. We deliver this learning through a progressive, cross-curricular, topic based approach, in which children learn through question and challenge. We aim to deliver content that enables children to build schemas - helping them to make connections in the knowledge and skills that they acquire both now and in the future and, following recommendations from the EEF Research School, we ensure that we teach both substantive and enabling knowledge (sticky concepts) to ensure children have a firm grounding in all subject disciplines. Being mindful of children's cognitive load,  we also strive to take our children's learning beyond the basic curriculum requirements, to develop their holistic wellbeing, positive mental health and cultural capital, and we aim to achieve this through a range of initiatives and programs such as our Stalyhill Character Awards, our Mindfulness programme and our commitment to outdoor learning and enrichment.

We want our learners to leave us with a toolkit of learning strategies that they can use throughout their lives and we therefore explicitly teach and discuss, in an age-appropriate way, the Building Learning Power capacities and the value of having a Growth Mindset. Through our 'Super-learner characters', our children learn resilience, resourcefulness, reciprocity and reflectiveness and understand how they can apply these capacities to improve their own learning. We understand that we cannot have meta-cognition without cognition and so we use a mixture of direct teaching and discovery learning to help children transfer key concepts and skills to long term memory. We recognise the benefits of play based learning and incorporate this into our curriculum as often as possible.

As a group of stakeholders, we have developed our 'Core Offer to children'. This is the minimum we pledge to offer all children that learn at Stalyhill Infant School. In addition to this our additional offer changes from cohort to cohort and year to year dependent on need. Our Core Offer to Children can be found below.

In the curriculum section of our website you will find further information and long term plans for each curriculum subject under the group headings; Core subjects, Technology subjects, Wellbeing subjects and Arts and Humanities subjects. Click on each group to explore the subjects within. You will also find the medium term plans (what the children will actually be learning in class each half term), for each half term under each year group heading. 

Please contact the school office on  admin@stalyhill-inf.tameside.sch.uk if you require any additional information about our curriculum.

Curriculum Accessibility 

Please follow the link below to view our accessibility plan.