Our Curriculum

'Let all that you do be done in love'

1 Corinthians 16:14

At St Anne's we strive to 'develop the 'whole child spiritually, mentally and physically within a caring, Christian environment' by helping them to:

Love God
Love Learning and
Love themselves and others.

This is realised through our curriculum and all that we do. The curriculum is the sum of all children’s experience at school. The curriculum seeks to secure for all pupils irrespective of gender, cultural, religious or social background entitlement to a number of areas of learning, creating lasting experiences for all. It also seeks to develop skills, knowledge and understanding necessary for pupils’ self fulfilment and development as active and responsible citizens.

As we consider, 'Let all that you do be done in Love' - we have high aspiration for the children in terms of the knowledge and skills they acquire in order to make a positive contribution to the world in which we live. From early years, we want to instil a love of learning, creating building blocks and sequenced learning to ensure progress is made and knowledge is retained.

Above all, we want the children to encounter a range of opportunities and experiences, developing their cultural capital with visits and visitors and enhancing their learning experience during their learning journey here at St Anne's.

We follow an EYFS long-term plan for our youngest children and then use a topic cycle, which is laid out, in our long term plan. This broad overview is broken down further in year group overviews that clearly show the progression of knowledge and skills needed for each subject.

Intent

It is our intention that every single child has access to a high quality curriculum that has been designed specifically for them.

All children are different; they have different backgrounds and different experiences. It is our job to design a curriculum that not only teaches children what they need to know to be successful academically, but also develops them as a person.

We place an emphasis on knowledge and vocabulary acquisition throughout our curriculum. We know that if nothing has changed in the long-term memory then nothing has been learnt at all. We have therefore designed our curriculum to take this into account.

By focussing on key knowledge and vocabulary and revisiting this again and again through varied opportunities, we deepen children’s knowledge thereby altering their long-term memory.

Our curriculum is a balance between making learning memorable and having the chance to practise.

Our curriculum expectations are high and we will challenge children's thinking. By allowing opportunity for our children to practise and return to prior learning we enable connections to be made and knowledge to be embedded into the long-term memory.

Implementation

We are very careful about our knowledge instruction – we understand that teaching knowledge well inspires the same excitement as ‘fun activities’ (which can sometimes distract from the core learning purpose) because children feel like they are learning and doing well.

The great thing about knowledge is that with every new fact you learn the number of new ideas and connections open to you increases enormously.

We focus on knowledge throughout the curriculum and ensure that children have mastered the key knowledge by constantly revisiting this enabling them to “Know more, do more and remember more”.

We know that if nothing is altered in long-term memory then nothing has been learnt. With that in mind we have simplified the curriculum to ensure mastery is achieved. We believe in depth and mastery over breadth.

Impact

Each curriculum subject sits within a "curriculum team".

There are five "curriculum teams" at St Anne's:

Language, Literacy and Communication
STEM
Creative Curriculum
Health and Well Being
Christian Distinctiveness

The subject leads within each team work collaboratively to consider how skills, knowledge and vocabulary connect and build over time in their subject so that we have a coherent and cohesive curriculum.

The School Development Plan drives areas for development of the curriculum to ensure it remains ‘fit for purpose’ and continues to meet the needs of the pupils at St Anne's C of E Primary School. All subject leaders, as well as the Senior Leadership Team and Governing Body, are involved with monitoring the curriculum. Learning is reviewed and monitored through a range of approaches.

As a result of our carefully planned and sequenced curriculum, we would expect the impact to be that:

Pupils love learning and are fully engaged with the curriculum.
Pupils have a rich vocabulary and are knowledgeable
Pupils achieve well and make good progress.
Pupils have experienced a variety of different and exciting activities.
Pupils remember exciting events from their school life.
Pupils are all competent readers.
Our pupils have had opportunities to experience activities outside of the ‘academic curriculum’.
Our children are well prepared for being successful citizens in modern Britain and they have a strong moral compass.
Our pupils are individually developed “spiritually, mentally and physically within a caring, Christian environment”.