Curriculum Overview

At St Joseph’s, we are passionately committed to providing our pupils with the best possible start in life. We are driven to equip every child with the knowledge, skills and values they need in order to become resilient, responsible and happy citizens of the changing world they live in. We fervently believe that all children deserve to succeed and our ultimate goal is to nurture articulate, well-informed children who are prepared for life’s many opportunities and challenges.

 

Our aims:

  • To deliver a relevant and ambitious curriculum that supports our pupils to understand the world around them and encourages them to form and express educated opinions.
  • To provide an inclusive and safe environment that equips all children, including those with special educational needs and/or disabilities, to unlock their full potential.
  • To foster inquisitive minds, providing opportunities for all children to question, choose, evaluate and argue rationally.
  • To adequately prepare children for the next stage of their educational journey.
  • To maintain high expectations of our pupils’ behaviour and attitude towards learning in school.
  • To establish and maintain positive relationships between everybody in our school community including pupils, staff and parents, recognising each person’s worth.
  • To maintain a culture of mutual respect and co-operation.

 

Knowledge

The Prototype Theory (Rosch 1973) suggests that when we encounter words, we use our previous knowledge and experiences to inform our understanding of the word. Furthermore, over time we build up webs or networks of meaning called ‘schemata’ (Anderson 1977) and one prototype triggers another, which triggers another, and so on. In order for our pupils to be able to create these layers of meaning and association, it is vital that they encounter rich and subject-specific vocabulary across the curriculum. In this way, every subject in the curriculum serves to improve children’s literacy, rather than the other way around. Sequencing the curriculum is vital; knowledge must be deliberately and explicitly revisited throughout a Key Stage and beyond.

 

Skills

Although skills are not as prevalent in the current national curriculum as perhaps they were previously, they are still a fundamental part of what we teach our children. Fleetham (2018) states that ‘skills-based learning provides classroom environments where independence, thinking skills, collaboration and active learning are developed at the same time as knowledge is acquired.’ Therefore, an engaging, high quality curriculum should consist of a balance of both knowledge and skills. Knowledge and skills are intertwined – being able to effectively use knowledge arguably matters more than just the acquisition of it, which is why skills are equally important. Research indicates that children learn more effectively and remember more when they can use skills to access, process and express their knowledge. An extreme swing to one approach rather than the other leaves a significant gap in children’s learning which is detrimental. (Moore 2017).

 

Values

We want our children as children of God and citizens of the world to flourish in independence, co-operation, responsibility, self-confidence, respect, perseverance, honesty, effort, friendship, aspiration and equality.  These values are extremely important to us and underpin everything that the children learn. By embedding these values into our curriculum and school life, we aim to nurture responsible, resilient and mindful individuals who are well prepared for life in the wider world.

EYFS

At St Joseph’s, we meet the welfare requirements laid down in the Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage and actively safeguard and promote the welfare of all of our children. We prioritise creating a ‘language rich’ environment through the use of songs, nursery rhymes, stories and providing time for quality interactions between adults and between peers. Trained and experienced staff ensure that interactions are positive and progressive, allowing children to flourish and gather words at pace in order to become confident communicators. Children are encouraged to become early readers through enjoyment of books and the systematic teaching of phonics through the Little Wandle programme. The children learn nursery rhymes and develop their mathematical thinking through direct teaching and exploration. We want our children to become confident mathematicians who can apply what they have learnt to real life experiences. We have built our school environment to enable our children to strengthen their core muscles through physical play, children spend time outdoors in all weathers. They develop through wonderful, exploratory, sensory experiences in our mud kitchen, and garden. Our learning environment is adaptable in order to reflect children’s interests and progression. The children are supported to learn to work together, manage their feelings and ask questions through skilled adult facilitated play. The curriculum is taught through topics which are enriched with classroom enhancements, trips and visitors. Topics are supported by quality key texts. These are chosen carefully to encourage children’s speech, language and communication development. All planning however, is flexible and responsive to children’s needs so plans can be changed and adapted depending on children’s interests.
We understand the importance of parental engagement and believe that our parents have a crucial role to play in their children’s education. We work hard to create strong partnerships between home and school.  Parents have access to Tapestry which informs them of what their child is learning and to explain how they can support this at home. Parents enjoy using Tapestry to engage in their child’s learning and share experiences from home. As part of the learning and teaching process, children are assessed in relation to their progress towards the Early Learning Goals (ELGs). These judgements are made on the basis of accumulative observations and in-depth knowledge of the children acquired through ongoing assessments. These ongoing assessments are used to inform planning and next steps in teaching and learning for all children throughout the year.

CUSP

Our Science, History, Geography, Art and DT are built on the foundations of the Unity Schools Curriculum (CUSP). This is an aspirational curriculum based on the principles of cognitive science, it is rich and aspirational. Our Curriculum is built to look beyond the subjects covered by the National Curriculum to grow our children to develop personally so that they can develop skills to become compassionate citizens in their local and global communities and learners for the future. CUSP is guided by evidence-led curriculum structures, such as retrieval, spaced retrieval practice and interleaving. It is underpinned by explicit vocabulary instruction and research-focused pedagogy. The principles of the CUSP curriculum are built around cognitive load theory, principles of instructions and evidence informed practice. The curriculum is knowledge rich, vocabulary rich and builds skills in a progressive way. The curriculum is sequential, systematically planned and supports acquisition of curriculum content. Each module contains 2 and 3 tier vocabulary, which is progressive from EYFS to Y6. We have dual coded knowledge organisers, opportunities to carry out quizzes to assess prior knowledge and knowledge notes for each lesson. All of the above ensure consistency and opportunities to retrieve previous knowledge and skills taught to build on what children have already learned and to ensure that those foundations are built upon.

Assessment for Learning

Assessment of pupil’s attainment and progress is directly linked to the curriculum followed by our school and evaluates pupils’ knowledge and understanding of subject requirements. Assessment is used to ensure that all pupils make appropriate progress.

There are three main types of assessment used at St. Joseph’s:

Formative Assessment

This is used by our teachers to evaluate pupils’ knowledge and understanding on a day-to-day basis and to tailor teaching accordingly.

Summative assessment

This is used to evaluate how much a pupil has learned at the end of a teaching period (end of a Unit/Topic, term or academic year).

Nationally Standardised Summative Assessment

This is used by the Government to hold schools to account and to provide information on how pupils are performing in comparison to pupils nationally.

 

Procedures – Formative and Summative Assessment

Day-to-Day Formative Assessments

This type of assessment is embedded across all lessons. Teachers assess pupils’ understanding of a topic and identify where there are gaps. This tells the teacher what to focus on in future lessons and prompts them to adapt their teaching approach to improve pupils’ understanding.

Tracking Pupil Progress

Teachers record ongoing assessments of pupils’ knowledge and understanding of curriculum objectives on SIMS (our online tracking program).