As you know, the six areas of learning were one of the proposals that were removed from the Education Bill prior to its becoming the Education Act 2010. The documents were supplied to schools but are no longer to be government policy. Officially we have been told that a new curriculum will be provided to schools for use from September 2013.

So where does that leave you?

If your curriculum is delivering the goods, your children are progressing well and are enthusiastic learners then there is no need to make any changes at present. What you were doing before still applies now and for the immediate future. However, if you are unhappy with your curriculum and/ or the children are not progressing as they should then you need to look within your own resources and those around you to develop your curriculum in the interim. The indication is that when the new curriculum is finally delivered, it will be the content rather than the method that is dictated to us. Schools, whether independent or not, should find themselves with a much greater degree of flexibility, albeit with some level of prescription.

From this point of view, you should be ready to experiment with your overall approach, if necessary. Hopefully you will be able to fit any future prescribed content into any framework you establish now. What you must continue to do, however, is to cover the national curriculum objectives. How you do this, is up to you. What is important is that it reflects the needs of your learners, engages and inspires them and is something that staff are enthusiastic about too.

Ideas to help you from our archives

Below we include some links to Imaginative Minds' materials that might help you.

Some ideas for planning formats that you might use can be found here. This resource would be useful if you were intending to adopt a cross-curricular or thematic approach to your curriculum delivery: Planning Layout.

In the ‘Primary File’ section of School Leadership Today (2.3) we focus on curriculum change.

• The changes to the Education Bill 2010
• An article by Martin Skelton of Fieldwork Education on what we can expect next for the primary curriculum
• An article by Kirsten Finley at Tranmere Park primary School about how they undertook curriculum change.

This Primary File includes some suggestions for what we might expect from the next primary curriculum and one primary school's experience of curriculum change: Primary File

An example of one primary school's approach to delivering the curriculum can also be found in the Manager’s Briefcase.

Guidance on curriculum development and design

The links below lead you to ideas that you can use when designing your curriculum:

Information about Balsall Common Primary School’s curriculum.

Information about approaches to curriculum development at Grange Primary School.

Ideas for curriculum enrichment at Wigley Primary School.

The curriculum at Framwellgate Primary School.

The curriculum at Crosshall Junior School.

The curriculum at Melcombe Primary School.

The curriculum at Tranmere Park Primary school.