At Brierley Hill Primary School, we believe that education has the power to transform lives. Our curriculum is meticulously designed to inspire, challenge, and empower every child, ensuring they leave us as resilient, articulate, and knowledgeable learners, fully equipped for the demands of secondary school and beyond.
Our approach is underpinned by the CUSP (Curriculum with Unity Schools Partnership) framework, ensuring a coherent, knowledge-rich, and vocabulary-driven education. Every subject is taught with disciplinary integrity, ensuring depth, rigour, and a clear progression of learning.
We have high expectations for every child, and our curriculum is designed to break down barriers, close knowledge gaps, and provide every pupil with the cultural capital needed to thrive in an increasingly complex world.
Brierley Hill serves a community where many children face significant socio-economic challenges. We recognise that our pupils may not always have access to the same opportunities as their peers elsewhere.
It is our moral imperative to level the playing field, ensuring that every child, regardless of background, has access to:
✅ A world-class, knowledge-rich curriculum that builds long-term retention and deep understanding.
✅ Explicit vocabulary instruction to close the word gap and empower confident communication.
✅ High-quality reading experiences that foster a lifelong love of learning.
✅ Enrichment opportunities that develop curiosity, creativity, and aspiration.
✅ Strong personal development education, ensuring that every child is equipped to navigate the complexities of modern life.
We recognise that overcoming adversity is a key challenge for many of our pupils. Through our curriculum, we ensure that pupils build resilience, confidence, and ambition, learning from historical and contemporary figures who have shaped the world despite obstacles. We introduce children to key themes of migration, understanding how movement has shaped societies and communities, and foster an appreciation of friendship and kindness, ensuring that every child understands the importance of respect and inclusion.
Our curriculum is meticulously sequenced, ensuring that pupils retain, apply, and build upon knowledge over time. We place a relentless focus on academic rigour, cultural capital, and personal growth, ensuring that every child leaves Brierley Hill with the tools to shape their own future.
In our Early Years, we place a firm emphasis on:
🗣 Oracy and Communication – Talk is the foundation of learning. We systematically develop speech, vocabulary, and structured discussion skills, ensuring children are confident communicators.
📖 Early Reading and Phonics – We deliver systematic, synthetic phonics alongside a rich diet of storytelling, nursery rhymes, and song, ensuring that every child builds fluency and a love for reading.
🎭 Experiential Learning & Physical Development – Our learning environment fosters exploration, curiosity, and movement, supporting both cognitive and physical development.
🔢 Early Mathematical Understanding – Through direct teaching and exploratory play, children develop a strong number sense, embedding early problem-solving skills.
🌍 Understanding Others – We introduce children to different cultures, traditions, and celebrations, ensuring that they respect diversity and appreciate their place in the world.
🌿 The Natural World – Children develop a sense of curiosity about nature, learning how environments change over time and the importance of looking after our planet.
We use knowledge documents to ensure that learning is deep, coherent, and transferable, setting the stage for success in Key Stage 1 and beyond.
Our CUSP curriculum is built on the principles of:
📌 High academic ambition – Every subject is taught with depth, challenge, and progression in mind.
📌 Carefully sequenced knowledge – Concepts build cumulatively over time, ensuring secure understanding.
📌 Explicit vocabulary instruction – Every lesson strengthens language acquisition, enabling pupils to articulate their thinking with precision.
📌 Retrieval and mastery – We systematically revisit key knowledge to ensure long-term retention and automaticity.
Each subject is taught explicitly and systematically, ensuring that pupils develop disciplinary expertise. From history and geography to science and art, our curriculum fosters deep thinking, problem-solving, and creativity.
Pupils explore British heritage, gaining a strong understanding of the people, places, and events that have shaped our nation. They also consider the impact of technology and the advancement of humanity, understanding how innovation has transformed society and continues to shape the future. Across all subjects, pupils engage with community, citizenship, and the wider world, recognising their role as active participants in society.
Reading is at the heart of everything we do. We believe that reading unlocks learning, and as such, our curriculum ensures:
📖 A structured, research-led reading curriculum – Ensuring that every child becomes a fluent, confident reader.
📚 Core texts embedded across subjects – High-quality literature enriches learning in every subject.
🔍 Explicit comprehension strategies – Teaching pupils to analyse, infer, and evaluate with confidence.
We carefully select texts that develop cultural awareness, promote kindness and friendship, and expose children to themes of migration, adversity, and resilience.
Our curriculum extends beyond academic success—it is our duty to equip children with the knowledge and skills to make informed, safe, and responsible choices.
By fostering friendship, kindness, and respect, our curriculum ensures that pupils develop strong moral values and empathy for others.
We believe that education should extend far beyond the classroom. Our children benefit from:
🎭 Cultural Capital & Heritage Experiences – Working with local and national organisations to bring learning to life.
💡 Aspirational Careers Programme – Visits, workshops, and careers events to inspire future ambitions.
🌍 Global and Local Learning – Exploring local history and geography alongside global issues and cultures.
📌 Closing the Digital Divide – Providing universal access to technology, ensuring that all pupils can engage in blended learning.
These opportunities expose children to real-world experiences, enriching their learning and broadening their aspirations.
By the time pupils leave Brierley Hill Primary, they are:
🎓 Academically successful – With the knowledge, skills, and confidence to excel.
📖 Fluent, confident readers – Equipped to engage with demanding secondary content.
🗣 Eloquent communicators – Able to articulate ideas with precision and clarity.
🌍 Empowered global citizens – Ready to make positive contributions to their communities.
🚀 Future-ready – With the aspiration, knowledge, and skills to succeed in an ever-changing world.
CUSP ensures that our curriculum is not only academically rigorous but deeply meaningful, equipping pupils with the resilience, curiosity, and ambition to thrive.
For further details, including:
📌 Knowledge Documents
📌 Subject-Specific Curriculum Maps
📌 Cultural Capital & Enrichment Opportunities
Please contact our Curriculum Lead, Tom Amphlett, at info@brierleyhill.dudley.sch.uk.
🚀 Our curriculum is not just about learning facts; it is about developing citizens who are knowledgeable, articulate, and ready to shape the world.