Our curriculum is designed to cater for the range of needs that our children bring to our school. We adopt fully inclusive practice which means all children, including those with SEN/D or are disadvantaged, are able to access the curriculum we offer through planned scaffolding or differentiation. It is our intent to provide a knowledge rich curriculum that is aspirational for all, has an emphasis on the development of children’s vocabulary skills and opportunities for children to put that knowledge into their long-term memories (sustained mastery). It is our intention to provide a curriculum that develops their cultural capital. We have high expectations for all and it is our intent that we provide all of our children with the skills, knowledge and understanding to be effective, inquisitive, life-long learners. This is achieved through the implementation of our ‘Building Learning Powers’, core Gospel Values and our school vision. Our curriculum is designed to recognise children’s prior learning, provide first-hand learning experiences, allow the children to develop interpersonal skills, build resilience through learning to fail well and become creative, independent, critical thinkers.

We have developed three curriculum drivers that shape our curriculum and reflect the unique needs of our children. They complement the core Gospel Values that are at the heart of our school and reflect our Catholic ethos. These drivers are used to give the children aspiration as they become citizens of the future. Our drivers are identified as:

Faith and Spirituality: This helps to show our children how the faith we have impacts upon our lives. We aim to develop a strong connection with God through prayer and reflection and allow the children to demonstrate this in a variety of ways. We value the beliefs of others and understand how they have an impact upon the community we live in.

Possibilities: This helps our pupils to build aspirations and know available possibilities for their future lives. We allow children to explore and experience the world around them and make positive decisions which may impact their future lives.

Initiative: We want to create independent and inquisitive learners who use their own initiative to problem solve to find creative solutions to complex problems. They will be able to apply a range of skills to a variety of contexts.

Our curriculum design in based on evidence from cognitive science; three main principles underpin it:

1. Learning is most effective with spaced repetition
2. Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention
3. Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular; which increases both storage and retrieval strength.

In addition to these 3 principles, we also understand that learning is invisible in the short-term and that sustained mastery takes time.

The impact of our curriculum is that by the end of each Key Stage, the vast majority of pupils have sustained mastery of the content, that is, they remember it all and are fluent in it; some pupils will have a greater depth of understanding.