Our Curriculum INTENT
St Paul’s Catholic School is a fully inclusive, inspirational school that helps children to foster a love of and life-long learning skills. Our curriculum is cohesive, real-life, broad and balanced and well sequenced. We promote collaborative, pro-active learning through a range of enriching and challenging experiences so that children are curious about the world around them and seek awe and wonder. Through a caring and nurturing approach, we will coach children to be able to self-regulate their behaviour, become independent, and make conscious well-informed choices. Our aim is to equip our children to thrive in an ever-changing world with the teachings of Jesus Christ at the centre of all that we do so that children can spread his love and message with those they meet.
Our principles
Our curriculum will be broad and balanced.
Our curriculum will be vocabulary-rich.
Our curriculum will be accessible for all.
Our curriculum will be child-centred.
Our curriculum will involve our community.
Our curriculum will encourage curiosity and engagement.
Our curriculum will balance knowledge and skills.
Our curriculum will foster global awareness.
Our curriculum will be rooted in the values of our faith.
Rationale for our Curriculum Design
- Many of our pupils join school with low levels of vocabulary and our disadvantaged pupils often have gaps in their vocabulary. Our curriculum has been developed to introduce/explore new vocabulary and activities have been planned to ensure that pupils get the opportunity to apply and revisit this new knowledge.
- We recognise the importance of Reading across the whole curriculum and its impact on the future success of pupils. Our children are taught to read confidently, fluently, with performance and with a good understanding. Pupils are encouraged to develop a habit of reading widely and often, for both pleasure and information through daily practice and whole school activities. Reading is at the heart of our curriculum.
- Key basic skills are not only taught in English and Maths but are also taught across all subject areas. We expect the same standard of work across all subject areas of the curriculum.
- Technology plays a key element in communicating with our community and we believe this is a fundemental skill for pupils to learn how to access the digital world safely and make best use of it. We model this regularly in lessons.
- As a Catholic school, we have designed a curriculum that teaches pupils morality, respect and a sense of community. Not only through our religious education and PSHE teaching but across the whole curriculum and in our daily school life. Pupil voice groups play a big role in the school and help to make key decisions.
- We have planned a curriculum that is knowledge-rich. There is a frequent repetition of content to help pupils acquire this core knowledge. Our curriculum provides mastery of key knowledge. Our Maths curriculum, for example, provides opportunities for pupils to practise and consolidate their learning, master learning objectives by developing a deeper understanding and to apply their knowledge in greater depth. There are opportunities for pupils who do not master learning objectives to repeat work before moving on. Knowledge organisers are used to support children in learning this key knowledge in our non-core subjects. These play a key part in the progression of knowledge and understanding including the development of vocabulary.
- In order to enable deep learning, the curriculum needs to be cohesive for children. We support children using flashback 4's to help children make connections in their learning across units, year groups and key stages. Engaging children is key to help them learn more and remember more over time. We use hooks at the beginning of non-core units of work to achieve this.
- We want our pupils to become independent, resilient and life-long learners so they are ready for secondary school (and beyond). Our curriculum focuses on a meta cognitive style of learning including activities that encourage pupils to reflect on how they think and strategies they can use to apply their knowledge. This includes explicitly teaching strategies for how to plan, organise knowledge and monitor tasks. We have developed a ‘growth mindset’ culture throughout our school teaching pupils to ‘have a go’, to use a different strategy if they get stuck, to seek peer support and to learn from their mistakes through use of the learning pit.
- Children take ownership of their learning through feed forward marking. The feed forward marking enables us to have a clear sequence of teaching so that children’s learning is built upon each lesson. Learning is constantly being moved forward, layered and the sequence is progressive. We empower children to challenge and review their own learning.
- Our aim is that all pupils make good progress across all areas of the curriculum (including disadvantaged pupils and those with a special need and/or disability). There is a sequencing of subject-specific concepts based on what we expect pupils to know at each particular stage ensuring challenge. We are an inclusive school and we aim to ensure curriculum access for all, including disadvantaged pupils and those with special educational needs and/or disabilities.