How did Romanby Primary School create a flexible primary curriculum by using Maestro?

A curriculum staff and children believe in

Romanby Primary School has been working with Cornerstones for twelve years, and in that time the partnership has become part of how the school thinks about teaching and learning. James Foxwell and his colleagues have found that the breadth of what the curriculum offers keeps both adults and children genuinely engaged.

We really like the range of content in the Cornerstones curriculum. Staff like it and the children like it.

That breadth is felt most clearly in subjects where schools can quietly narrow the content they teach without always realising it. Art is one example. The Cornerstones curriculum regularly introduces the school to artists and approaches that the team would simply not have found on their own.

We would never have considered the range of artists the children learn about in Art.

Reducing workload without reducing ambition

One of the reasons schools sometimes hesitate to adopt a commercial curriculum is a worry that they are trading away control in exchange for something generic. At Romanby, the experience has been the reverse. Maestro gave the team the ability to tailor content to their children while protecting the time staff would otherwise spend building resources from nothing. The volume of material available has become its own small challenge to manage.

Staff now say that there are often too many resources for the time we have available!

That sense of abundance, rather than scarcity, is a significant shift for a school that once faced the prospect of rebuilding its curriculum entirely. The platform brought together quality, flexibility and motivation in a way that the team had not anticipated when they first made the decision to work with Cornerstones.

The Cornerstones curriculum on Maestro gave us a high-quality curriculum that we could tailor to the needs of our children; it reduced our workload and excited everyone with the learning opportunities available.

A relationship that has grown over time

Twelve years is a long time to work with any provider, and trust at that level is not simply a matter of product quality. It also comes from feeling that feedback is genuinely heard. At Romanby, the team has seen the platform develop in response to the things schools actually say.

They have listened to our comments and made platform updates in response to feedback.

Summary

Romanby’s story is one that many primary leaders will recognise. The school had already done the hard work of building its own curriculum once, and when the ground shifted again in 2014, it made a clear-eyed decision not to start from scratch a second time. Choosing Cornerstones and Maestro gave the team a foundation they could trust and then shape, without asking teachers to carry an impossible load.

If you are weighing up a similar decision in light of the upcoming curriculum and assessment review changes, the experience at Romanby suggests that a well-chosen curriculum partner does not replace a school’s own thinking. It gives that thinking somewhere solid to stand.