At a glance
- A platform that provides overview curriculum planning
- Accessible interface, with intuitive curriculum design tools
- Loaded with customisable options that allow for a bespoke curriculum to be built
- Focused on the whole picture, not just resources and lesson plans
- Encourages efficacy across schools and trusts
Curriculum design lies at the heart of any school. The complexities involved and the rigour required can be overwhelmingly time consuming for teachers and leaders alike.
Juniper Education has developed an answer: a software program that empowers and enables teachers to design a broad and balanced curriculum in a series of simple clicks.
It really is that simple, and the output is usable, useful and accurate.
Unlike many other curriculum products on the market, Sonar Curriculum doesn’t focus on micro planning.
Instead of offering reams of planned lessons with heaps of resources, the software is designed to help empower teachers and leaders to build a curriculum overview that is tailored for their context and their pupils.
As such, Sonar Curriculum provides the stitching for teachers and leaders to weave together their idiosyncratic planning approaches with a wider whole-school, or whole-trust approach.
Moreover, Sonar Curriculum isn’t limited to curriculum design through topic breakdown.
The cofounders were determined to overcome the fragmented side effects created by a solely topic-driven curriculum and instead, Sonar Curriculum offers users the option to focus on teaching specific subjects as entities.
Not only does this mean that foundation subjects are given the exposure they deserve, but learners (and teachers) are able to explore subjects in more depth, ensuring that nothing gets lost in the wool.
The future holds some exciting new additions, including full integration with Juniper’s assessment platform, Sonar Tracker, as well as carefully curated book boxes to complement the printable classroom resources.
At its core, Sonar Curriculum provides leaders and teachers with a concise framework of coverage, pitch and sequence for all core and foundation subjects.
The online platform provides a comprehensive solution to your primary curriculum design and comprises a multitude of materials for curriculum mapping, short and medium planning and resources to support the delivery of effective teaching and learning.
All content is intuitively accessible and the functionality is exceptionally user friendly. Sonar Curriculum means you can quite literally design and disseminate a coherent curriculum in a few short clicks.
Not only does Sonar Curriculum provide the framework, it also provides the required intricacies essential for robust design.
The National Curriculum is broken into standardised and sequenced objectives across every strand of every subject, skills, knowledge and understanding are deliberately mapped to ensure cumulative fluency across the primary phase.
As such, the output is a fully accessible, reliable and usable overview to support teachers with their implementation.
Besides the obvious strengths in design and functionality, Sonar Curriculum has been curated with teachers in mind and it comes as no surprise that the cofounders pride this as one of the key strengths.
Little touches such as the summaries of required content for each subject, the tutorial videos for navigating the site, the support and simply the layout are all designed to reduce workload for real teachers. And it works. It works really well. Sonar Curriculum has a way of giving you confidence in what you are developing, with a sense that there is support just a click away.
Sonar Curriculum is designed to be responsive. Not only is the blog kept up to date with the latest DfE news, the platform itself is constantly undergoing upgrades and the future holds some exciting new additions, including full integration with Juniper assessment platforms.
The verdict
- Designed with teachers in mind
- Exceptionally clear outputs from curriculum design - easy to understand
- Links to National Curriculum descriptors helps with formalisation
- Customisation means that teachers and leaders have real freedom
- Really handy if you are building in consistency across your school or trust curriculum
Upgrade if…
You are looking for a platform that helps structure and design a fully loaded curriculum, without all of the additional baggage. Also consider if you are considering reducing staff workload and simplifying approaches.
Head to junipereducation.org/sonar-curriculum for full details, watch a video overview of the Sonar Curriculum here or click here to book a demo.
Review by Adam Riches
