Announcing our new collaboration with Reach Academy Feltham

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Over the past year we’ve been working behind the scenes with Reach Academy Feltham to bring you a new, whole-school curriculum for Primary History and Geography. 

The Reach Out curriculum resources provide an intelligently sequenced knowledge-rich curriculum, informed by the latest evidence on how pupils learn; developed and written by classroom teachers and educational experts over the past three years.  

Through a new collaboration with the Pearson Primary team, we’ve been able to further develop these tried-and-tested resources used in hundreds of classrooms across the country, to provide a flexible teaching and learning solution for primary history and geography. These new resources offer a clear progression of learning by adding a comprehensive KS1 offer, to build into KS2: gradually building pupil knowledge, skills and curiosity: ensuring National Curriculum requirements, and supporting the development of confident young geographers and historians.   

“Primary teachers do an incredible job at offering all children a broad and balanced curriculum, switching seamlessly from long division to greetings in French and then executing the perfect cartwheel. Teachers deserve high-quality and detailed resources to help ensure they can build on what has come before and set children up for what is coming next.

After writing booklets for a range of topics in history and geography, we were delighted to work with Pearson to develop the resources that had grown out of our practice at Reach Academy Feltham and have been helpful to other schools.

The team at Pearson have added publishing expertise and scrutiny to ensure that the curriculum resources are engaging and build gradually year on year. The greater emphasis on application of the knowledge set out in each unit will be particularly useful for teachers who want to ensure that their children master their historical and geographical skills.

With the addition of the Concept Toolkits, supporting subject knowledge and conceptual understanding of ideas like ‘Location and Place’ and ‘Cause and Effect’, teachers will now have the full set of support for history and geography.Now, at a time when teachers have so much to think about, when pupils have been out of usual lessons for almost a year, we are confident that our relationship with Pearson will be able to offer the launchpad for schools to ensure that all children leave primary school with a broad, balanced, inclusive and diverse understanding of history and geography.” 

– Jon Hutchinson, Director of Training and Development at Reach Academy Feltham. 

"Reach Academy Feltham were the obvious choice for us in looking for partners to share proven curriculum resources for primary history and geography, as their impact on practice in subject teaching was so significant. Building on their ethos around developing a knowledge-rich curriculum, Ed Vainker, CEO of Reach Foundation, and his teaching team at Reach Academy Feltham have engaged in the research around cognitive science and fielded far and wide with class-teachers around the country to develop a robust primary geography and history resource.  

What really impressed us about the Reach Academy Feltham team was, not only their pedagogical rigour but the hundreds of classrooms who have clarified their intent, been supported through their implementation and seen evident impact. 

We were also hugely impressed by their openness to evolving their approach and involving our team to continue to improve the offer to schools. This is what's made our relationship with Reach Academy Feltham so successful. We were able to bring our expertise in Accessibility - to help more children succeed in their learning, as well as in Equality, Diversity and Inclusion – through our new global editorial guidelines, which are starting to make such an impact on our commitment to a fairer education for all.