Nova Curriculum
Nova aims to provide an inclusive, purposeful and challenging curriculum that inspires children to learn the knowledge and skills they need to become global citizens who make a positive difference to our world.
We believe that a rich and meaningful curriculum should do more than teach facts — it should help children make sense of the world around them. That’s why we use the CUSP Curriculum, built around powerful Big Ideas that connect learning across subjects and year groups. These Big Ideas are woven throughout our curriculum to help pupils:
Make connections across subjects – Building a broad and joined-up understanding of the world.
Revisit and deepen learning – Using retrieval and fluency to strengthen memory and understanding.
Think and talk critically – Encouraging discussion, reasoning, and debate.
Understand global issues and cultures – Preparing pupils for life in modern Britain and beyond.
Our goal is for every child to leave Nova with a deep understanding of these Big Ideas, ready to thrive in secondary school and as thoughtful, informed citizens.
Reading is at the heart of the curriculum, and we are committed to children developing a love of reading through daily reading of a range of texts linked to children’s interests and the wider curriculum. The teaching of phonics, using systematic synthetic phonics, is given a high priority from the start of the Foundation Stage and through Key Stage 1. Children are taught how to decode and read fluently to enable them to understand what they have read. We teach specific reading comprehension skills using VIPERS (vocabulary, inference, prediction, explanations, retrieval and summarising).
Children are taught how to speak, read and write fluently so that they can communicate their ideas and emotions to others effectively. Children are given purposeful writing opportunities across the curriculum to apply their vocabulary, SPAG and writing skills.
We place an emphasis on children developing their mathematical fluency and recall of key number facts and times tables. This enables children to solve reasoning problems more easily. Children are given purposeful opportunities across the curriculum to apply their mathematical skills in meaningful contexts.
We have high expectations for our children in all subjects and aim for children to at least meet age related expectations to prepare them for their future school careers.
We are committed to the inclusion of all pupils through appropriate challenge and support, so all children’s needs are met, and they are equipped to overcome potential barriers to learning. Our school curriculum enables us to support our children to shine brightly, without limits and for them to help others shine too.
Through a combination of the CUSP curriculum and other expertly crafted curricula, such as our Nova reading curriculum, Talk for Writing, Language Angels and others, our ambition is to provide children with the best educational experience which is rooted in real experiences, real knowledge and high-quality teaching. Through this, we aim to ensure our curriculum is:
Connected
We ensure that pupil knowledge is explicitly connected across subjects in order to develop a rich schema. Through systematic revisiting of concepts and substantive knowledge, we embed that knowledge into their long-term memory, making it easily accessible for future learning.
Cumulative
Our cumulative curriculum starts in Key Stage One, where we have identified and ensured foundational knowledge is made explicit and taught with rigor. Our approaches to a strong foundation for our pupils include; daily Systematic Synthetic Phonics scheme (continued into KS2 where required), daily Number Factual Fluency programme, daily handwriting and spelling instruction.
Coherent
The CUSP curriculum is built around the 9 Big Ideas e.g. Sustainability which weave their way through all subjects as well as each subject having the substantive knowledge and concepts clearly defined and intentionally planned for in each unit. Each subject has a specific disciplinary body of knowledge and skills to be learnt. We teach children to ‘think like a scientist’ and ‘talk like a scientist’ in their lessons. We have chosen to teach some subjects following other curricula. The implementation of each follows our pedagogical model
Of course, all the above is grounded in the fundamental belief of our school values, which we believe set high standards and expectations for our children and school community.
TRUST – In ourselves and in our school community
FRIENDSHIP – Showing kindness and learning together
DISCOVERY – Showing bravery to challenge ourselves, without limits, so that we can be our personal best.
SUCCESS – A belief that with effort anything is achievable
Jon Deeney, Assistant Headteacher, is our Curriculum Leader who you can speak to if you would like to find out more.
Nova Curriculum Intent
Here is our Nova Curriculum intent 2026. You will find further details about subject intents and curriculum saved in subject pages.