At Highfield, the demands of our community and our global society drives our curriculum, our planning, and our decision making. Our community is ambitious, aspirational, culturally diverse and evolving demographically. Combined with the demands of a rapidly changing global society, employment market, impact of covid, mental health, online competency for example, our curriculum is designed to meet these challenges. 

For us, the National Curriculum is just the starting point. Our programmes of study extend beyond this and are guided by our key drivers: Safeguarding, Reading, RED (respect, equality, diversity) and Enrichment which are woven through the Highfield Curriculum. Furthermore, we build meaningful links across subjects to improve the quality of the offer. We also recognise the importance of relating the curriculum in a local and global context. In doing so we meet the needs of the individual, as well as the wider community.  

To acknowledge all we do, on Wednesday 27^th May we held a RED Exhibition to celebrate the richness of our provision and our community with the wider community: parents, Governors, local organisations and local dignitaries.  

The afternoon started with a sea of colour in our assembly hall, with children wearing traditional costumes, organisation uniforms and colours belonging to the flags of their heritage. The children were obviously very proud, with a number of them standing up to show off their outfits and talk about their heritage.  

The hall was set up with individual stands for each year group which showcased posters with examples of the wonderful work that we cover within our curriculum and details of how it links so closely to the RED ethos. Each stand was manned by the School Councilors, who did a fantastic job talking to the visitors who all seemed very impressed with the way the children could articulate what we do. We received many comments on how polite, knowledgeable and enthusiastic they were.  

In addition, there were group performances which went down a storm. From the choir singing our specially composed RED song, accompanied by year 3 playing their ukeleles; Year 1 singing and signing in BSL and Year 5 reading their poems inspired by Benjamin Zephaniah.  

The afternoon closed with individual performances including Bollywood, Bhangra and traditional Indian dancing, plus a traditional Iranian folk song played on the piano, a saxophonist, an Islamic song and a song from Iraq. All the children were extremely brave to perform for such a large group of people but were obviously very proud to do so.    

We wanted to shine a spotlight onto this aspect of our school. We certainly achieved this as the afternoon was universally enjoyed.