In the primary setting, as one teacher for the most part will deliver the full curriculum, interleaving within a year is a natural and logical part of practice. Last term, children in Years 3 and 4 across our schools learned about cams and mechanical motion in design and technology. This in turn informed their work on forces and magnets in science and this, in turn, informed their work on the structure of the earth and magnetic poles in Geography. This term children in Year 5 and 6 are learning Maafa history – coinciding with and celebrating Black History Month – elsewhere in Art they are studying groundbreaking and inspirational artists with African heritage such as Edmonia Lewis whose 1867 statue “Forever Free” celebrated the end of slavery two years before.

The interplay between these units allows the same topic to be seen through different lenses – art and history, or science, geography and design. All of this allows constant revisiting of the content from different angles and that repetition, recasting, and revisiting in the context of the unit ensures it is learned. It allows us to defy the “forgetting curve” of seeing the topic only once and one way. All of this works for one unit – but this also has an effect over time for spaced practice and interleaving. The same content on forces and magnets comes back again but involving more complex machines, more challenging methods – when children study forces and mechanisms. The work on trailblazing artists who use art to drive concepts and ideas is picked up in a future art project that looks at conceptual and protest art relating to the environment, taking the concept that great art speaks to ideas and placing it in another context.

Gareth Davies, Trust Head of Curriculum and Assessment 

The full article can be read: The Curriculum Conversation: Making the Connection