Curriculum

Intent

Our Curriculum, seeks to meet the needs of our children by balancing spiritual, academic and physical development. For each of our children the balance between those elements, that best meets their needs, will be slightly different reflecting the uniqueness of the individual as part of God’s creation. Whilst being built on provision accessible to all, our curriculum is ambitious and retains the flexibility to be adapted to the individual in order to best support their development.

The curriculum aims to: teach the children to keep themselves safe and healthy, as unique and loved human beings who can contribute to community through service to others and to God; ensure every child can read and is numerate in order to access the rest of the curriculum; provide children with the knowledge needed to develop accurate and creative responses to questions drawing on scientific method, imagination, oracy, comprehension and faith; develop physical abilities through experience of a range of activity and sport.

Implementation

Children are challenged daily to be inquisitive, resilient, creative, and independent learners through the quality teaching of knowledge and skills in all subjects. Whilst we teach subjects discretely, teachers skilfully ensure content is combined in a cross-curricular approach.

Teachers’ pedagogy is based on Rosenshine’s Principles of Effective instruction. We use it as a model for quality first teaching. Teachers constantly review prior learning to build on knowledge, they continually question children to broaden their thinking and to assess understanding, and they support and stretch pupils based on their ability. When teachers introduce new content, they do so in a logical, sequential way and always model best practice.

Timetabling

The Educational Endowment Foundation asks us to consider three key principles from their studies into cognitive science and the processes by which all of us commit information to our memories.

Learning requires information to be committed to long-term memory.

Information is processed through the working memory.
The working memory has limited capacity and can be overloaded.

We have taken this into account when planning our school timetable. In order to commit information to the long-term memory, we practise subjects daily and in a logical sequence. In the mornings, all classes will learn English. Depending on the age of the children, this will include handwriting practice, phonics, spelling, grammar and writing. There will also be a dedicated reading lesson as described in our English Curriculum. The children will have a break, and then move on to daily Mathematics lessons.

After lunch, we teach a broad range of subjects following the National Curriculum. Please visit individual subject pages for more information.

Impact

When children leave St. Martin de Porres Catholic Primary School, they will have a strong spiritual knowledge and faith based upon the Catholic nature of our school.

They will have a strong web of knowledge across the curriculum subjects that is deep, durable, and transferable from one context to another.

They will have the ability to retrieve knowledge and make connections between contexts; apply their skills across a range of subjects; an ability to think deeply about important concepts and apply their knowledge and use it to solve problems and generate creative solutions.

They will be creative, innovative, and critical thinkers; be sympathetic and have an awareness of other people’s feelings; and show tolerance and forgiveness.

They will be resilient, confident learners who will be prepared for their next phase of education and beyond.