Respect – Resilience – Read – Retain
Doing the little things well: St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School Curriculum
Here at St Teresa’s School we a curriculum for all children which engages and helps children to know more and remember more. We encourage our children to do all things well to the best of their ability inspired by our school mission statement ‘do the little things well’.
We audited our curriculum and chose what we want our children to experience and achieve. We want our children to leave St Teresa’s School secondary ready and with knowledge and skills to help them in their future lives.
Our pupils’ backgrounds, our culture and our climate for learning provide the following drivers that underpin our curriculum and our vision and weave through all that we do.
Respect – Resilience – Read – Retain
Respect – we aim to develop a sense of respect for themselves, peers, adults, other faiths and cultures, the environment and the wider world
Resilience – we aim to develop a ‘give it a go’ and ‘its ok to make mistakes’ attitude within our children to prepare them for life beyond school
Read – we believe that reading is the doorway to all learning, we will prioritise the teaching of reading in school
Retain – we aim for our children to know more and remember more, our curriculum design will reinforce and revisit skills and knowledge
Intent
Our curriculum encompasses not only the formal requirements of the National Curriculum and EYFS statutory framework but aims to go beyond the experiences of the classroom to ensure that our children are exposed to the richest and most varied opportunities that we can provide to ensure they leave St Teresa’s secondary ready.
We encourage the children to respect their school, each other, other faiths, cultures and the environment and to transfer that respect into pride in their learning. We believe in celebrating their learning in school.
Our curriculum has been devised to support our children in their spiritual, personal and social development in addition to their academic learning. Following Covid lockdown we identified that resilience was an area to develop. We provide learning experiences that build on previous skills and knowledge and give the children opportunities to develop their resilience through a supportive encouraging environment.
We believe that reading is the key to opening the doors of the curriculum and a vital skill in life beyond the classroom. We develop a love of reading from entry into school, we prioritise reading in our curriculum and put vocabulary at the core of each subject.
Our curriculum has been carefully planned to revisit skills and knowledge through retrieval, ensuring our children retain and know more and remember more.
As part of the Bishop Hogarth Catholic Education Trust, we work together to develop learners to have a holistic set of values that prepares them for life in the modern world in a diverse and ever-changing community and work place. These can be found in the character traits which we teach and promote to all children and underpin our behaviour policy and reward system. The traits are respect, resilience, compassion, honesty, responsibility, self-belief, justice and confidence.
Implementation
As a school within Bishop Hogarth Catholic Education Trust, we teach from schemes of work designed by a transition team of our primary school staff working with subject specialists from our secondary schools, in addition to schemes of work planned by our own school staff. This means our curriculum has been designed to suit the pupils of St Teresa’s and to ensure clear progression, in the acquisition of knowledge and for key skills, building on pupil’s prior learning.
The curriculum units of work have clearly identified minimum knowledge ‘end points,’ and have been sequenced to ensure that pupils know more and remember more as they move through primary school and transfer into KS3.
Lessons are well planned, resourced and delivered using sound subject knowledge in an engaging purposeful way. We teach subjects discreetly and make links with other subjects only in a meaningful way, helping to ensure that our children develop a rich and deep subject knowledge through deep questioning, use of assessment for learning, planned retrieval tasks and assigned assessment tasks follow the end of each unit taught.
Our teachers plan and teach from a clear and well defined destination with the end point clearly in mind. With this knowledge our staff design learning that focuses on small steps progression. It is sequenced so that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before and pupils can work towards the clearly defined end points. EEF research and best practice tell us that new learning is fragile and usually forgotten unless explicit steps are taken over time to revisit and refresh learning. Retrieval tasks are interwoven into our teaching to ensure learning has transferred to long term memory. Each lesson revisits the previous learning and pupils get regular opportunities to practice new learning.
We encourage our children to ‘have a go’ in a supportive manner to develop the children’s resilience. Staff support the children to keep trying and not give up
A strong emphasis in given to the teaching of new vocabulary starting in EYFS, across all subjects. Subject specific vocabulary will be planned within all units of learning and explicitly taught. Opportunities will be provided for the children to engage in conversations with each other and adults, starting with the modelling of this in early years through frequent speaking and listening focussed tasks and day to day interactions. Vocabulary will be enhanced across all areas of the curriculum with children exposed to new and challenging vocabulary at every opportunity.
At St Teresa’s we have a carefully constructed timetable to ensure that all subjects within the curriculum receive and appropriate amount of coverage as well as meets the needs of the children.
We make very good use of the rich diversity of our local area to help them to look out to the world, using the coast, the power station and local industries to support our learning. We ensure that global issues are addressed within the curriculum and within Collective Worship as key issues arise.
Impact
The ultimate impact of our curriculum is simple, we can demonstrate the children know more and remember more.
We want to instil in our children a love of learning and an understanding that the learning is part of a journey they are on. Each day we encourage our children to work hard, be respectful, have a positive mind-set, have the confidence to make mistakes, persevere and not give up – in order to succeed, and to feel good about themselves.
How we know we are successful in this is through:
- End of Key Stage National Assessments
- Retrieval practice such as pre and post learning quizzes, questioning, flash cards; games; quizzes; children presenting their learning
- Teacher assessment – formative and summative – through ongoing questioning, dialogue, verbal and written feedback, informal quizzes, practical tasks, day to day work.
- Learner Voice – pupil questionnaires, self and peer assessment, school council, learning dialogue in the classroom that encourages self-evaluation.
- Parental Feedback – parent questionnaires, parental engagement sessions, parent/teacher meetings, Facebook group, Friends of the school
- Data Analysis – internal with SLT, subject leadership, pupil progress meetings, governors, School Improvement Partner (SIP) and external data (National Assessments)
- Quality Assurance – regular and triangulated monitoring from leaders at all levels.
- Pupils are making progress in that they know more, remember more and are able to do more. They are learning what is intended in the curriculum.
- All learning building towards an end point. Pupils are being prepared for their next stage of education.
The impact of what we do and what the children achieve cannot always be measured in data sets and numbers so we always try to look holistically at the whole child. We work hard to ensure disadvantaged pupils and pupils with SEND acquire the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life.
We consider our children as individuals. who are facing future challenges and ultimately leave us secondary school ready having enjoyed and embraced their learning experiences along the way. Children leave St Teresa’s Catholic Primary School belonging to a tightly knit school community. They have the confidence and skills to make significant decisions through peer and self-reflection and have aspirations and high expectations of themselves, enabling them to enhance their cultural capital and know about life beyond.
Pedagogy
At St Teresa's School we have worked as a team to ensure our lessons are consistent and follow the same core format and aims.