Primary – Free Digital Content, App or Open Educational Resource
Barclays LifeSkills
Barclays LifeSkills aims to equip people with the skills, knowledge, and confidence they need throughout their lives. The free programme provides a range of interactive online tools, films and classroom resources to help people develop core transferable skills, improve their employability and financial capability skills, and adapt to the evolving world of work.
Our new primary school resources teach pupils aged 7-11 how to form good money habits, explore being a critical consumer and start considering the emotional aspects of financial capability through fun, digital, story-based learning .
Five interactive lessons can be delivered flexibly as standalone sessions, part of a series, or remotely. They map to the four UK nation curriculums across maths, literacy and career-related learning and have been awarded the Young Money Quality Mark.
They also help to develop core transferable skills like problem solving, communication, teamwork, and creativity, which improve pupils’ employability and financial capability skills and help them adapt to the evolving world of work.
BBC Education – BBC Teach Live Lessons
BBC Teach is home to all teacher-facing content from the BBC and is used by 48% of primary teachers and 41% of secondary teachers. It supports teachers by creating curriculum-related content for the classroom, including video, audio and Live Lessons.
Live Lessons are 30 minute interactive programmes that are available on the BBC Teach website and now on CBBC as part of the Bitesize Learning Zone. They are presented by recognisable faces from across the
BBC such as Rhys Stephenson and Naomi Wilkinson and include a range of special guests like Prof Brian Cox, Chris Packham and Olympic weightlifter Emily Campbell. All our Live Lessons are curriculum-linked and are often planned around celebrations in the educational calendar such as World Book Day and Safer Internet Day.
Educational Recording Agency – Natural Curriculum
The Natural Curriculum provides comprehensive grammar lessons based on captivating clips from the BBC’s natural history archives. Developed by primary school teacher David Millington and the Educational Recording Agency (ERA), the resources are aimed at pupils in Years 3, 4, 5 and 6. With an ERA Licence, your school can access all of the site’s resources for free.
The Natural Curriculum offers a programme of learning in which children are immersed in the wonders of nature, provoking their creativity and inspiring their imagination. The grammar lessons, created by experienced
KS2 teachers from across the UK, cover the statutory material at KS2 and can easily be adapted to provide further differentiation.
Simply choose your grammar objective, and find all the necessary resources for delivering an hour-long lesson, revolving around your selected animal. Lessons contain:
• a stimulating clip alongside a focused learning objective
• an explanation of the grammar concept (complete with high-level models)
• scaffolded AFL whiteboard challenges
• writing challenges with a downloadable worksheet.
The enthusiastic response from teachers and insights gained from our grammar resources have prompted us to produce and pilot lower KS2 Maths lessons with the aim of a full launch in 2022.
INEQE Safeguarding Group – Teach Hub & Home Learing Hub
The Teach and Home Learning Hubs are excellent safeguarding resources made by the online safety experts at INEQE Safeguarding Group. Both websites are packed full of resources to support teachers, parents, and carers in helping children stay safer online. They are part of the Safer Schools educational resource collection and are free to access for all.
We believe keeping children and young people safe online requires a whole-school approach. Our Teach Hub is the virtual toolkit for teachers and school staff, providing them with the tools they need to build a school community with solid online safeguarding foundations. To support the work of school staff and teachers, the Home Learning Hub is there for parents and carers to continue online safety lessons outside of the school gates. It contains adapted versions of the materials available to teachers and not only aims to educate pupils in safeguarding issues, but to support parents and carers too.
Whether you are learning from home or in the classroom, INEQE Safeguarding Group has the perfect safeguarding resource to match your needs.
Young Money – Money Heroes, free activities for home and school
Money Heroes is an award-winning free programme from Young Money, supported by HSBC UK, seeking to transform financial education for primary children, aged 3–11, in school and at home.
Recognising that parents and teachers are key influencers in a child’s development, the programme enables a collaborative, child-centred approach to teaching financial education, both at home and in the classroom.
A range of resources, tools and guidance for parents and teachers, hosted on a bespoke online platform, ensures that children have the opportunity to develop their knowledge and skills across the core themes from the Young Money Primary Financial Education Planning Framework.
A set of resources, including KS1 and KS2 storybooks and games, bring learning to life in fun and engaging ways, along with the Money Heroes podcast series and parent guide seeking to support and empower parents to introduce talking about money at home.
As children work their way through the various activities and develop their knowledge, progress can be tracked on the platform so teachers and parents can see and share their development.
Mathigon – Polypad
Polypad is the ultimate mathematical playground: allowing students to explore and discover, be creative, collaborate and learn problem-solving. Hundreds of tools and features cover the entire mathematics curriculum and Mathigon also provides an extensive library of free lesson plans, tutorial videos and regular online workshops.
The unique manipulatives are incredibly intuitive to use and seamlessly work together. Students can create tessellations and other art, or the net of a polyhedron which then folds into an interactive, 3D solid. The virtual dice can be placed on a balance scale to create random arithmetic problems. You can create a parallelogram, cut it into two pieces, rearrange those to make a rectangle, and finally use the virtual ruler to measure its width and height. Our prime factor circles allow you to “pull numbers apart” into their factors, the tables and statistics tools make it incredibly easy to generate data visualisations, and there’s built-in graph plotting and dynamic geometry. Teachers can also create interactive worksheets, assign them through our class management systems, and then review their students’ work. Or you can just have fun with one of the many puzzles and games in our library of examples. The possibilities are endless!
NFU Education – Farming STEMterprise
Farming STEMterprise is a range of free, engaging, cross-curricular STEM and enterprise projects for primary school children. They have been designed with three main goals in mind: to save teachers time and reduce workload, spark learners’ enthusiasm for STEM subjects and convey important messages about food and nutrition through a cross-curricular, project-based approach.
Farming STEMterprise engages learners through real-life, meaningful problems. The projects take children through each stage of setting up a farm shop business: considering seasonality when deciding which crop to grow, growing their own ingredients, considering nutrition when designing their recipes, using market research to test their ideas with consumers, working within a budget when buying ingredients, learning knife skills when making their products, calculating expected profit, designing responsible packaging and more.
Practical Science and Design & Technology lessons, closely tailored to each year group’s programme of study, are incorporated throughout the projects and opportunities for applying Maths skills to engaging, real life problems are embedded at each stage. Farming STEMterprise enables teachers to deliver the core content from the national curriculum whilst developing learners’ soft skills such as public speaking and teamwork, as well as vital life skills such as healthy eating, knife proficiency and financial literacy.”
White Rose Maths Primary Resources
Established within a successful Multi-Academy Trust in 2017, White Rose Maths is dedicated to improving maths education in schools. Basing all that we do on robust, world-class research evidence, we’re building a new culture in which every child can both enjoy maths and become a confident and resilient mathematician.
Our small-step, mastery-based schemes of work (SoLs) now used by 90% of UK primary schools, and in 140 countries worldwide are the foundation for the vast portfolio of supporting resources, content and CPD that we produce, develop and expand year on year. For maximum impact and value, our SoLs are and will always be free, and we’re committed to continuing to provide many of our other high quality resources and content free of charge, too.
In the last academic year, we’ve continued to support practitioners, pupils, parents and carers with a number of new and free initiatives including a post-closure Return to School webinar; a series of videos to help parents understand key maths concepts and teaching methods; Y6 projects to help prepare for transition to secondary school; an exciting collaboration with the supermarket brand, Morrisons to provide free workbooks to encourage learning in the summer break, and more.”