Disciplinary Concepts

A concept is a mental representation of a thing or a class of things. Disciplinary concepts are ones judged to be particularly important in a certain context. This includes a sense of scale and range, as well as importance, within the subject.

At Chaddlewood, disciplinary concepts are used as longitudinal themes to link the subject together to ensure that the curriculum is continually reinforced and so that pupils remember more in the long term.

We have created our own disciplinary concept symbols. These are added to our resources and are used to tie current understanding to previous.

A child's age, the context and the topic that we are learning, impacts on how explicitly we teach these. 

Substantive Themes

We have identified the major substantive themes that feature in each subject at Chaddlewood Primary School. Our curriculum ensures that pupils regularly encounter a wide range of important substantive themes as they are extremely important to pupils’ understanding of new material. 

Our pupils come across these often abstract terms in every year of school. They are therefore able to draw on their secure knowledge of these concepts repeatedly in a number of different contexts and make links across the curriculum.

Main Question

Main questions are used in history, geography and design and technology to explore each curriculum module. These are used to ensure that the learning that children experience remains focussed.

Key Questions

Key questions are used to answer the overall main question of a unit of work in history, geography and design and technology. They are also used in all other subjects to support learning. These are developed from the key concepts. Key questions are used to assess children’s prior knowledge at the start of a unit. Retrieval practice is used to assess children's understanding throughout a unit of work. Planning and follow-up lessons are then adapted accordingly.