OUR CURRICULUM
🌟 Willow Park School – Teaching & Learning Overview 🌟
At Willow Park, we believe every child is unique and learns best through play, relationships, and sensory experiences. Our curriculum is designed to help children communicate, explore, and grow in confidence.
🧭 Our Learning Pathways
We offer three pathways to match each child’s needs:
1. 🌱 Curious Pathway (Pre-Formal)
For children at the earliest stages of learning. Focuses on sensory play, trust-building, and early communication. Activities include music, movement, and exploring textures. It places relationships, sensory engagement and emotional regulation at the heart of learning. The curriculum is intentionally process‑based and experience‑led, recognising that pupils make progress through exploration, repetition, co‑regulation and interaction, rather than through formal instruction.
Across all areas, pupils are supported to develop awareness, expression, engagement, anticipation, and early intentionality, with learning highly personalised to each child’s sensory profile, communication style, physical needs, and emotional readiness.
🧭 Curious Curriculum Areas
1. 🗣️ My Communicative Interactions
This area focuses on the earliest foundations of communication. Pupils learn to show awareness of others, share attention, and express preferences through facial expression, body movement, vocalisation and early AAC. Adults model communication within predictable routines to support joint attention, early turn‑taking, anticipation and simple back‑and‑forth exchanges.
Early mark making also sits here, helping pupils understand that their actions can create effects that others notice and respond to.
2. 🎨 My Sensory Play
Pupils explore a wide range of sensory materials and experiences involving touch, sight, sound, movement, taste and smell. Through sensory play, they develop curiosity, preferences, tolerance of new sensations, and the ability to engage in shared sensory moments with familiar adults.
Early numeracy emerges naturally through comparing materials, exploring quantity (full/empty, more/less), noticing patterns, sorting objects, and discovering shapes.
Mark making is also embedded as a sensory experience that supports exploration, regulation and early expression.
3. 🏃 My Physical Play
This area develops pupils’ awareness of their bodies and how they move. Pupils engage in playful activities that promote reaching, grasping, climbing, rolling, balancing and manipulating objects. They experience adult‑supported movement routines that help develop coordination, motor planning and proprioception.
Physical play also introduces number through counting movements, action songs, repeating movement sequences, and exploring rhythmic patterns.
4. 🎵 My Musical Interactions
Music offers a highly motivating context for communication, shared attention and emotional expression. Pupils respond to sounds, rhythms and melodies; anticipate familiar musical cues; and participate in simple musical interactions such as clapping, tapping, pausing and copying.
Music also provides a natural context for emerging number awareness through beat counting, simple sequencing, pattern recognition and rhythmic repetition.
5. 🌍 My Interactions Outside of the Class and School
Pupils are supported to experience the world beyond the classroom in safe, structured, meaningful ways. This may include outdoor learning, real‑world sensory experiences, community visits and exploring different environments around school. These experiences promote confidence, curiosity, flexibility, and social awareness.
Real‑world numeracy is embedded through counting steps, noticing numbers on doors and signs, exploring shapes in the environment, and matching or sorting objects outside.
6. 🧘 My Movement
This area deepens pupils’ physical development through physiotherapy‑informed activities, hydrotherapy, dance, yoga‑inspired movement and body‑awareness games. Pupils learn to change position, transition between movements, and experience different speeds, rhythms and directions. Movement sessions also support self‑regulation, sensory processing and emotional wellbeing.
7. 🧼 My Independence
This area supports pupils to develop early autonomy, participation in routines and emerging self‑help skills. Pupils learn to anticipate familiar sequences, make choices, express needs, and participate in dressing, feeding, tidying and self‑care with graded support.
Emerging numeracy is embedded within routines — such as counting items when setting the table, sequencing steps in a task, matching objects, and recognising simple patterns in daily activities.
8. 🍽️ Curious About Food
This area develops pupils’ awareness, exploration and early participation in food‑related experiences. Pupils explore different tastes, textures, temperatures and smells; develop early feeding skills; and begin simple food‑related actions such as grasping finger foods, exploring feeding tools, tolerating cooking equipment, and participating in early hygiene routines.
This area also introduces early functional independence, choice‑making, and sensory tolerance around food.
9. 🔢 My Maths (Curious)
Pupils explore early mathematical concepts through sensory and play‑based experiences. They learn through filling and emptying containers, exploring capacity, responding to changes in size or shape, matching objects, recognising patterns, and beginning to experience time through daily routines. Cognitive foundations such as cause‑and‑effect, anticipation, spatial awareness, and object permanence are also developed here.
10. 📚 My Reading (Curious)
This area introduces pupils to engaging, meaningful experiences with books, stories, rhyme and image‑based texts. Pupils listen to short stories, respond to familiar narratives, recognise pictures or symbols, and begin to anticipate key moments in songs or rhymes. Book interaction includes holding books, turning pages with support, and exploring print and images within shared story routines.
11. 🔡 My Phonics (Curious)
At this developmental level, phonics focuses on early phonological awareness: noticing environmental sounds, exploring vocal sounds, experiencing rhythm and rhyme, reacting to repeated patterns in songs and stories, and beginning to recognise that sounds can be meaningful. Pupils may begin to identify simple sounds or patterns through playful exploration rather than formal teaching.
12. ✏️ My Mark Making (Curious)
Pupils begin to explore how their movements create marks. This includes using hands, tools or objects to make marks in sensory materials, exploring grasp patterns, making dots, lines and early patterns, and developing finger isolation or early hand control. Pupils begin to give meaning to some marks, laying the foundations for early writing and expressive communication.
2. 🌿 Engaged Pathway (Informal)
For children developing independence and communication. Learning is play-based and sensory-rich, helping children build relationships and express themselves.
The Engaged (Informal) Curriculum at Willow Park School supports pupils who are beginning to show greater intentionality, independence, and purposeful interaction with others and their environment. These learners are transitioning from primarily sensory‑based, co‑regulated experiences toward more active exploration, emerging problem‑solving, purposeful communication, and increasing autonomy in familiar routines.
Teaching remains relational, multisensory and highly individualised, but pupils now demonstrate the ability to initiate, choose, persist, and apply skills across different contexts. Learning is embedded within motivating, meaningful activities, allowing pupils to develop early functional understanding through hands‑on experiences.
The curriculum represents a shift from experiencing to engaging, from reacting to intending, and from adult‑led regulation toward co‑regulation and emerging self‑regulation.
🧭 Curriculum Structure – All Engaged Areas
1. 🗣️ My Communication
Pupils develop intentional, socially purposeful communication, using gesture, vocalisation, sign or AAC in more flexible and autonomous ways. They learn to initiate interactions, share ideas, express preferences or feelings, and adapt communication according to the partner and situation.
Children sustain joint attention for longer periods, participate in simple interaction routines, and begin to engage in early conversational exchanges or recount simple experiences.
2. 🎨 My Sensory Exploration
Learners explore sensory materials and environments with growing independence and intention. They begin to vary their actions, combine materials, notice changes, and form short, purposeful exploratory sequences.
Pupils take part in small‑scale cooperative sensory play, copying or responding to others’ actions, and develop early problem‑solving as they adjust their approach to achieve simple outcomes. They begin to generalise sensory exploration skills across new contexts.
3. 🧩 My Engaged Play
Pupils participate in more structured and purposeful play, including movement‑based routines, imaginative experimentation and early problem‑solving. They show stronger body awareness, explore a wider range of movement patterns, and create simple self‑generated play sequences.
Children begin to use play for self‑regulation, engage in co‑regulated movement (mirroring, taking turns, synchronising actions), and respond flexibly to physical challenges in play environments.
4. 🌍 My Outdoor World
Learners develop confidence exploring outdoor environments, moving over different terrains, and interacting with natural materials. They participate in supported outdoor routines and respond to simple outdoor challenges such as navigating slopes or avoiding obstacles.
Children begin to show awareness of boundaries and safety, initiate outdoor exploration, and join peers in simple cooperative activities such as collecting items, exploring features, or following short outdoor routes.
5. 🧘 My Physical Development
Pupils explore a broader range of movement patterns and begin to adjust movements deliberately in response to environmental demands. They develop early motor problem‑solving skills and can follow or create simple multi‑step movement routines.
Children demonstrate increasing control, coordination and flexibility across settings, participate in co‑regulated physical activity, and begin to make choices that support their physical wellbeing (e.g., requesting rest, choosing equipment).
6. 🧼 My Independence
Pupils start to initiate familiar routines, make purposeful choices, and take increasing responsibility for their belongings and personal care tasks. They practise organising items, completing simple sequences, and applying strategies that help them remain successful (pausing, seeking help, repeating steps).
Children begin to generalise independence skills across less predictable environments and use communication to express needs during tasks. Early problem‑solving and self‑advocacy continue to develop.
7. 🍽️ Engaged with Food
Learners take part in purposeful food‑related tasks, including using tools safely, following hygiene routines, measuring ingredients, preparing simple dishes, and beginning to follow multi‑step recipes.
They learn kitchen safety, practise early cooking methods, work cooperatively with peers, and develop awareness of food properties, preferences and dietary needs. Pupils begin to evaluate their work, adapt when things go wrong, and take pride in producing food for themselves or others.
8. 🔢 My Maths
Pupils develop early functional mathematical understanding through hands‑on exploration. They compare, sort and order objects by size, weight and capacity; recognise and name 2D and simple 3D shapes; and create, copy and extend patterns.
In number, pupils count reliably, match numerals, explore concepts such as “more”, “less”, and “the same”, and begin simple number operations in practical contexts (addition, subtraction, doubling, halving, sharing). They also explore time, money and positional language in meaningful routines and play.
9. 📚 My Reading
Learners deepen comprehension by discussing stories, poems and non‑fiction, predicting events, identifying characters or settings, and retelling familiar narratives in sequence. They show increasing awareness that print carries meaning and recognise basic book conventions (direction, words vs letters, title, author).
Phonological awareness progresses to blending and segmenting sounds, noticing rhymes, and identifying sounds in different word positions. Word reading includes reading digraphs/trigraphs, decoding simple phrases and sentences, and recognising a growing number of high‑frequency and exception words.
10. 🔡 My Phonics
Using the Monster Phonics approach, pupils engage systematically with Phases 2–4. They learn to recognise graphemes, blend to read CVC and CVCC words, segment to spell, and read tricky words appropriate to each phase.
They apply phonics knowledge in functional reading and early writing tasks, developing confidence, accuracy and independence in decoding and encoding.
11. ✏️ My Mark Making
Pupils use mark making with increasing purpose, writing labels, captions, names and short meaningful attempts at words. They imitate adult writing behaviours, understand that writing communicates meaning, and begin to apply phonics in early spelling.
Children form recognisable letters, use more stable grasp patterns, show awareness of spacing and basic punctuation, and develop growing fluency in writing familiar words and simple sentences.
Engaged Scientific Enquiry
Scientific enquiry is embedded across the seven areas of the Curious Curriculum at Willow Park School. Scientific enquiry is both present and purposeful within our curriculum model.
Check here for our Scientific Enquiry through the Engaged Curriculum
3. 🌳 Flourishing Pathway (Semi-Formal)
The Flourishing (Semi‑Formal) Curriculum at Willow Park School is designed for pupils with moderate to severe learning difficulties who are ready for more structured learning, greater independence, and early subject‑based development. Building on the Curious and Engaged pathways, pupils at this stage show stronger intentionality, functional understanding, and increasing ability to generalise skills across contexts.
Learning remains practical, multisensory and highly scaffolded, but pupils now access a broader curriculum through clear learning intentions, structured teaching sequences, and repeated opportunities for application in real‑life contexts. The Flourishing Curriculum balances functional life skills with early subject learning so that pupils can develop confidence, competence and independence, alongside growing curiosity about the world.
Across the pathway, teaching supports pupils to move from engaging to applying, from supported exploration to functional learning, and from co‑regulated participation toward emerging self‑direction, resilience and self‑advocacy. PSHE and SMSC are woven throughout, supporting pupils’ developing identity, relationships, wellbeing, values, and sense of belonging.
🧭 Curriculum Structure – All Flourishing Areas
1. 🗣️ My Communication
Pupils develop increasingly confident communication for a wider range of purposes: to share ideas, clarify information, ask and answer questions, negotiate, collaborate and self‑advocate. Communication is supported through speech, sign, symbols and AAC, with growing fluency across people and contexts.
IT is embedded through the purposeful use of communication technology (AAC devices, switches, tablets, visual systems), supporting pupils to choose tools, manage them independently and communicate across settings. PSHE links include expressing feelings, managing conflict, and communicating needs and boundaries respectfully.
2. 🧠 My Thinking and Problem Solving
This area develops pupils’ functional cognition, including early reasoning, sequencing, prediction, attention, memory, categorisation and flexible problem‑solving. Pupils learn how to approach challenges, persist, and evaluate what worked.
Science is explicitly woven in through early enquiry skills: noticing changes, observing cause‑and‑effect, exploring materials, light, sound, weather, living things and simple investigations in real contexts. Computing/IT supports pupils to use digital tools for sequencing, sorting, decision‑making, and modelling simple choices (e.g., using apps, timers, cameras, interactive tasks).
3. 🎲 My Play and Leisure
Pupils develop more mature play and leisure skills, including structured play, cooperative play, rules‑based activities and independent leisure choices. They learn to initiate and sustain play, take turns, negotiate, cope with small frustrations, and transition appropriately between activities.
PSHE and SMSC are central here: social understanding, friendships, teamwork, emotional regulation, fairness, empathy and developing confidence as part of a group. IT links include engaging with leisure technology safely and purposefully (e.g., choosing games, using simple digital creative/play tools with adult guidance).
4. 🎨 My Creativity (Art, Music, Drama, DT and Creative Subjects)
My Creativity brings together Art, Music, Drama, DT and wider creative experiences in a semi‑formal context. Pupils explore materials, tools, performance, rhythm, movement and role‑play with increasing intention. They learn to plan, create, refine and share outcomes, building pride, self‑expression and identity.
DT is explicitly embedded, including designing, making, evaluating, joining materials, simple construction, and purposeful tool use (often linked to real‑life contexts such as making props, models, cards, simple items or food‑related design tasks). SMSC is developed through creative self‑expression, cultural exploration (music/art from different traditions), collaboration, and respect for others’ ideas and performances. IT links include digital creativity (photos, audio recording, simple editing, presentation of work, digital art tools).
5. 🌍 The World and Me (including Citizenship and RE/SMSC)
Pupils explore their place in the world through a structured “Understanding the World” approach that includes early Geography, History, RE, Citizenship, PSHE and SMSC. They learn about people, places, community roles, local environments, seasons, routines, and key events—grounded in lived experiences.
RE is explicitly woven in, supporting pupils to encounter stories, symbols, celebrations and practices from different faiths and worldviews. Pupils also develop early spirituality: awe and wonder, reflection, belonging, gratitude, and personal meaning (e.g., noticing beauty in nature, calm moments, music, light, shared celebration).
Science links include weather, seasons, habitats, materials in the environment, and caring for living things. IT and digital citizenship are included through learning about safe technology use, recognising trusted adults, understanding online/offline routines, and using digital tools to explore and represent the world (photos, maps, simple searches with adults, recorded observations).
6. 💪 My Physical Wellbeing
This area supports physical health, stamina, coordination, motor competence and confidence through structured movement, sport‑style activities, dance, fitness, outdoor learning and therapeutic approaches. Pupils practise following instructions, safe equipment use, teamwork, and developing healthy habits.
Science links include the body, senses, health, exercise, hygiene and simple understandings of wellbeing. PSHE is embedded through self‑regulation strategies, self‑care, body autonomy, and managing risk safely. SMSC is supported through teamwork, resilience, perseverance and pride in achievement.
7. 🧼 My Independence
Pupils develop functional life skills including self‑care, dressing, organisation, personal safety, managing belongings, travel‑style routines within school/community, and completing multi‑step tasks with reduced prompting. They learn to self‑advocate and make informed choices.
PSHE is explicit here: wellbeing, relationships, independence, self‑esteem, understanding safe/unsafe, consent and boundaries (age/stage appropriate), and managing emotions. IT links include using schedules, timers, checklists, communication tools and simple digital supports to promote independence.
8. 🍽️ Flourishing with Food
Learners develop greater independence in food preparation: following hygiene routines, using tools safely, measuring, sequencing steps, adapting when something goes wrong, and preparing simple meals more independently. Pupils also explore nutrition, preferences, and cultural foods.
Science links include materials and changes (mixing, heating/cooling), senses, healthy choices and basic food science. Maths is naturally embedded (measures, time, quantity, money). PSHE and SMSC are developed through shared meals, turn‑taking, responsibility, cultural awareness, confidence, and working safely with others.
9. 📖 My Reading
Pupils apply decoding and comprehension to increasingly functional and meaningful reading. They read for enjoyment and information, follow instructions, recognise signs and symbols, and discuss texts with growing understanding. They practise prediction, sequencing, inference at a simple level, and retrieval of key information.
Science and Humanities links appear through reading topic texts, non‑fiction, simple reports and environmental print in real contexts. IT links include accessing digital texts, using audio‑supported books, and researching topics with adult guidance.
10. ✍️ My Writing
Pupils write for purpose using words, phrases and simple sentences (or equivalent through AAC/alternative recording). They apply phonics in spelling, improve handwriting/typing, and use basic punctuation with support. Writing is connected to real outcomes: lists, labels, messages, recounts, simple explanations and creative writing.
Computing/IT is integrated through word processing, using assistive tech, typing, voice‑to‑text where appropriate, and using digital tools to draft, edit and publish work. Cross‑curricular links include writing in Science (observations), The World and Me (recounts), PSHE (personal reflection), and Creativity (scripts, captions, design notes).
11. 🔡 My Phonics
Pupils consolidate and apply phonics for decoding and spelling, building fluency and confidence. Teaching focuses on accurate blending/segmenting, working with more complex words, tricky/common exception words, and applying phonics within meaningful reading and writing.
This area supports access to subject learning across the curriculum, enabling pupils to read instructions, labels, topic vocabulary and everyday texts more independently.
12. 🔢 My Maths
Pupils develop practical numeracy for everyday life: number, calculation, measure, shape, space, time and money. They apply maths in real contexts such as shopping role‑play, cooking, travel routines, data collection, and problem‑solving tasks.
Science links include measuring, comparing, recording results, pattern spotting and simple data handling. IT links include using digital timers, money apps, interactive maths tools, and recording information digitally. PSHE links include independence with money, making choices, and using maths to navigate routines confidently.
In the Flourishing Pathway, learning is subject-based but not subject-driven. This means pupils access a broad range of curriculum subjects (e.g., Communication, Literacy, Maths, Science, The World and Me/RE, Creativity, Physical Wellbeing, Computing/IT and PSHE/SMSC), but teaching is always personalised, functional and rooted in real-life contexts. Knowledge and skills are introduced in small, carefully sequenced steps and taught through practical experiences, modelling, overlearning and scaffolded independence. Pupils are supported to apply learning across settings and routines (generalisation), using consistent visuals, structured prompts and supportive technology where appropriate. Progress is defined by increasing understanding, independence, confidence and the ability to use skills purposefully in everyday life—not by coverage alone.
🗣️ Communication is Key
We use many tools to help children communicate with adults and friends, including:
• Makaton signs
• Communication Boards
• Now and Next boards
• Visual timetables
• Personalised AAC tools
These help children make choices, express feelings, and join in with others.
🧠 What about reading and maths?
We do teach early reading and number skills—but not in the same way as mainstream schools. Instead of formal lessons, we use real-life, playful moments to introduce these ideas. For example:
• Counting scoops of sand in a tray
• Spotting numbers on a walk
• Exploring books through touch, sound, and pictures
• Singing songs with rhymes and rhythms
These small, meaningful steps help children build understanding in a way that feels natural, fun, and achievable.
🎲 Learning Through Play
Play is at the heart of everything we do. Children learn to:
• Explore on their own
• Play alongside others
• Share and take turns
• Work together in group play
Staff gently guide children to build these skills through fun, meaningful activities.
🧩 Supporting Children with Autism
Children with autism often learn in a different way. While most people build understanding through web-like connections (called schemas), autistic learners may develop more rigid, ladder-like schemas. This means they might learn something well in one setting but struggle to use that knowledge in a different situation.
For example, a child might learn to count to 100 using counters, but if you ask them to count 8 cups, they may not be able to do it—because their learning is tightly linked to the counters only.
At Willow Park, we understand this. That’s why we:
• Teach through repetition and routine
• Use real-life, hands-on experiences
• Support learning across different settings
• Focus on generalising skills (using them in more than one place)
This helps children build flexible understanding and apply what they’ve learned in everyday life.
