Our Curriculum

Our Curriculum Intent

Our aim at St Joseph’s Catholic Primary is to provide an excellent education for all our pupils; an education, which brings out the best in all of them and prepares them for success in life. Our curriculum ambitious and is designed to provide children with the core knowledge they need for success in education and later life, to maximise their cognitive development, to develop the whole person and the talents of the individual, allowing all pupils to become active and economically self-sufficient citizens. Our curriculum at St Joseph’s enables children to appreciate and participate in the full richness of the human experience. Subjects work together by identifying knowledge, thematic and skills-based links. These links are exploited through joint planning which enables pupils to make connections that will help them to understand the world around them and their place in it.

St Joseph’s Catholic Primary provides a broad and balanced curriculum through creative and innovative approaches to teaching and learning. Across all subjects our curriculum frameworks promote high standards through sequencing in both the acquisition of knowledge and skills.

St Joseph’s is part of the Bosco Catholic Academy Trust. Teachers and leaders across the trust have been involved in developing our curriculum, founded on these key principles;

• Entitlement – We believe that all children have the right to learn. St Joseph’s aims to ensure that all children have equal access to a rich and ambitious curriculum delivered through day to day quality first teaching and a continuing focus on clear progression planning and sequencing of every lesson and in every subject studied.

• Mastery – We want all students to achieve a full understanding of the knowledge specified in the Curriculum for each year, and teaching should not move on until this is achieved. This extends across all age ranges and abilities at St Joseph’s.

• Concepts not context – The Curriculum is intended as a concise specification of knowledge and content to be taught and learned; it is for teachers to decide how to teach and bring it to life.

An Outstanding Early Years Curriculum 

Our Early Years setting is welcoming and engaging and supports our youngest learners in discovering and developing the early building blocks for successful learning. Through a balance of teacher-directed and child-initiated learning, children engage in enquiry, discovery and reflection in order to become confident in expressing their ideas, happy to make independent choices, proficient in ICT and keen to explore the world around them. The stimulating and challenging indoor and outdoor learning environments provide an exciting context for developing an early love of learning.

Innovative Approaches to English and Mathematics

We have a clear focus on the enhancement of English and Maths. All children require this core knowledge to enable their access and success across all areas of the curriculum in all phases of education and for their future success in life. The daily teaching of English and Mathematics, both as discreet lessons and across the wider curriculum enable our pupils to reach high standards by the end of both Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. We are ambitious for all our learners and have high aspirations for all our pupils regardless of their starting points.

The whole school progressive framework for English provides children with real-life and engaging purposes and audiences for reading, writing, speaking and listening. Daily teaching of phonics and spelling is highly interactive and enables children to secure at least age-related expectations in these core basics. Children read widely and often across the curriculum supported by our use of innovative ICT based systems, which track children’s developing fluency and depth of comprehension.

Learning from international practice, our approach to mathematics involves both fluency practice and fast paced mathematics lessons each day. Using our ‘same day intervention approach’ pupil’s learning is personalised at the point of need to ensure that they are challenged and supported to acquire new skills and knowledge each day. Pupils develop fluency and depth within the curriculum and as a result they grow as confident mathematicians.

The curriculum is based on real-life contexts for learning with opportunities to celebrate and share outcomes with a range of audiences.

Developing the Whole Child 

Our primary curriculum model is a ‘LEARNING’ curriculum. Our engaging and inspiring approach centres around five learning skills, which permeate all aspects of the St Joseph’s curriculum.

The St Joseph’s learning model ensures that children develop the characteristics of good learners and the vital skills required for the next phase of education and work. We have 5 learning skills which underpin our work:

Every child can succeed when provided with a caring, inclusive environment where they have access to a curriculum that empowers them with knowledge, experience and entitlement. Our high quality curriculum enables a breadth of experience for our pupils, valuing every child so that they engage in their schooling and reach their potential. Our vision: “Believe, Achieve, Succeed” drives our curriculum design (intent) our delivery (implementation) and ensures visible and measurable outcomes (impact).

All children, from Early Years through to Year 6 are entitled to a broad and balanced curriculum offering a solid foundation of knowledge and experience to deepen their understanding and support their personal growth. We teach all pupils to be safe, be respectful and be responsible.

We want our pupils to learn the skills required of each subject respecting the traditions and importance of subject disciplines. We provide a clear narrative of what we teach, why we teach it and how it is taught and assessed so that we know if it is understood. Knowledge and skills are inextricably linked and the performance of skills is enhanced by what we know and understand.  We believe the acquisition of knowledge empowers our pupils and appreciate that if pupils don’t remember what we have taught them, then even the richest curriculum is pointless. Knowledge is powerful when it is remembered. Building on prior knowledge and making connections ensures secure deep understanding and builds long-term memory.

A wide range of subject routes and pathways support pupils’ changing interests, aspirations and needs, preparing them for secondary education and meaningful, productive future learning.  To compliment our pupils’ academic study, we provide a wealth of support, guidance and engagement opportunities that enrich their educational experience. All pupils’ are supported in their learning, contribution and participation in every aspect of school life to aid their progress, personal growth and well-being. This is further enhanced through our curriculum passport.

The power of our inclusive curriculum rests in our determination that all of our pupils be creative, well-rounded and responsible citizens who fulfil their potential and play a positive role in society. For all pupils attending St Joseph’s we provide an educational experience that ensures accessibility, knowledge, responsibility and enjoyment.

Last year we were able to gather once again for our International Day.  This is a day where the children embrace the culture of a given country.  For that week, they are immersed in music, art, story-telling and dance which is then shared with the rest of the school community. The final celebration is an expression of thanks and joy for our rich and diverse community.

Our Curriculum Implementation

How we deliver, teach and assess our curriculum

We recognise that developing our pupils’ understanding is not a simple threshold but rather a gradual accumulation and reordering of knowledge over time. The following principles underpin our curriculum planning:

• Specific: content design clearly states what children learn across the year and throughout their time at St Joseph’s;
• Cumulative: each year builds upon the next structuring points of recall and revisit of core knowledge and making links to prior, current and future learning;
• Well-rounded: all subjects enrich a child’s education and when complemented by our wider curriculum empower and transform a child’s life;
• Preparatory:  expectation is age related preparing and encouraging all children in their next steps to progress in both their current and future studies;
• Rigorous: complex and rigorous academic topics are carefully planned and taught to aid recall, build competence and foster self-belief and pride

Our approach to teaching and learning supports our curriculum by ensuring that lessons build on prior learning and provide sufficient opportunity for guided and independent practice.

Everything from which children learn in school – the taught subject timetable, the approach to spiritual, moral, social and cultural development, the house system and the ethos and ‘hidden curriculum’ of the school – are to be seen as part of the school curriculum at St Joseph’s. The principle of ‘Believe, Achieve, Succeed is delivered through the curriculum in this broadest sense and continues to grow and develop over time as the Bosco Trust’s reputation continues to grow. We are very proud of our music, drama and PE extracurricular offer which sits alongside a host of other enrichment activities. This is reflected further in each child’s curriculum passport.

Impact

We have been able to develop common assessments in 6 subjects (English, mathematics, science, geography, history, PE and RE). These assessments allow pupils at St Joseph’s to demonstrate their growing understanding of their subjects and teachers to assess the impact of their teaching. These assessments are taken three times a year enabling teachers to focus on formative assessment from lesson to lesson. Our formative assessments are designed to support pupils in achieving fluency in each subject. This means that in lessons pupils are quizzed on prior knowledge in order to embed this knowledge in their long-term memory. This frees up their working memory to attend to current learning. We are particularly conscious of the role that literacy and vocabulary plays in unlocking the whole curriculum. Our teachers explicitly teach the meaning of subject-specific language, and we expect lessons to contain challenging reading and writing. Curriculum overviews provide pupils with key information in each subject, broken down by term, enabling them to memorise the key knowledge they require in order to be able to perform higher-level functions such as analysis and evaluation. We also encourage all pupils to read widely and provide guided reading lists to pupils, parents and carers.

Every pupil has an equal right to a challenging and enlightening curriculum. By teaching this curriculum well, and developing effective habits in our pupils, we bring out the best in everyone at St Joseph’s. We truly believe every child has the ability to “Believe, Achieve, Succeed.”