At Hunningley Primary Academy, our Foundational Skills Curriculum is designed to ensure that every pupil, regardless of starting point, develops the essential knowledge, language, behaviours and learning habits required to access the full curriculum and succeed in life.
The curriculum is underpinned by a coherent, highly sequenced progression from 18 months to Year 3, ensuring that pupils build knowledge cumulatively and securely over time across key domains:
- Oracy
- Literacy (reading and writing)
- Mathematics (number and structure)
- Self-regulation and behaviour
- Physical development
This progression ensures that pupils move systematically from:
early development → fluency → independence → application → reasoning
We are explicit that securing these foundational skills is not an end point, but a deliberate foundation for future scholarship. By ensuring pupils achieve fluency and automaticity in the basics, cognitive capacity is freed to think deeply, reason, and engage with increasingly complex knowledge. This enables pupils to move beyond surface-level understanding towards genuine proficiency, where knowledge is applied flexibly, connections are made across the curriculum, and pupils are able to think, articulate and learn with independence. In this way, the Foundational Skills Curriculum lays the essential groundwork for academic excellence and intellectual curiosity.
Our intent is that pupils:
- Develop high levels of communication and language, enabling them to articulate, reason and engage confidently in a range of contexts
- Secure automaticity in reading, writing and number, removing barriers to the wider curriculum
- Acquire strong transcription and composition skills, aligned precisely with the DfE Writing Framework
- Build executive function, including attention, self-regulation, resilience and independence
- Develop the physical readiness for learning, including posture, core strength and fine motor control
Inclusion is central to our curriculum design. In line with the SEND White Paper:
- Needs are identified early, precisely and systematically
- High quality first teaching and adaptive practice is prioritised for all pupils.
- All pupils access the same ambitious curriculum, supported through adaptive teaching rather than lowered expectations
- Scaffolds are designed to remove barriers and build independence over time
By extending into Year 3, the curriculum ensures pupils are not only ready for KS2, but are secure, fluent and increasingly independent learners able to apply knowledge with confidence and depth.