At Sacred Heart we have developed our curriculum to meet the visions we have through our intent statement:

 

‘The curriculum at Sacred Heart Catholic Primary School is intended to provide every child in our care, thoughtfully-sequenced, and engaging learning experiences. This learning journey will allow all children to achieve distinguished academic standards, fulfil their maximum potential and become positive contributors to the world around them’.

 

Each subject leader has worked to create documents that work together to clearly show and demonstrate the vison for individual subjects (see separate documents).

We aim to provide an inclusive “balanced and broadly-based curriculum” which promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society, and prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. To enable this to happen, our intent statement and our mission statement ‘Together we live and learn; we play and pray’ work hand in hand.

Throughout our curriculum, we have included 12 ‘threads’ which have been selected:

Community & Co-operation, Peace, Perseverance, Courage, Hope, Friendship, Forgiveness,

Responsibility, Justice, Tolerance, Equality and Living things.

These have been carefully selected by staff and children as values we believe to be important as well as taken from our Gospel Values which we work with in school. These ‘threads’ will permeate all areas of school life, including our delivery of the curriculum.

Implementation and Impact

The curriculum committee of Sacred Heart initially designed a new curriculum to be implemented in the summer term of 2020. When this had been initially trialled (despite some differences enforced through the pandemic) we were then able to adapt accordingly to improve. Through our robust monitoring of subject provision and feedback, it was highlighted that some lessons were not sequenced as we had wanted them to be, to show clear progression. Through adapting this and changing theme overviews, this has now be achieved.

Our curriculum has been coherently planned and sequenced so that pupils gain cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning and employment – new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before and towards clearly defined end points. This includes and reflects our local context and will address typical gaps in pupil’s knowledge and skills. Appropriately selected concepts will be re-visited year on year to further embed children’s knowledge and understanding.

The design of our curriculum comes from a culmination of the following:

• Extensive research into successful key principles of learning and curriculum areas
• What our children want to learn
• The opportunities for our children to learn about
• The want (and need) to deliver a broad and balanced curriculum
• How our school and its locality can help to support the children in their learning  
• How we can develop our children as learners in all areas, not just core subjects
• Meeting as a staff with the aim of ‘taking the curriculum we deliver in a different way’
• Curriculum meetings, staff CPD, support from our MAT
• The resources we have and how to make the best use of them (school grounds, stakeholders skills and knowledge, local businesses etc)
• Focussing on skills progression and mapping these out across the year groups

Rather than provide children with ‘an education’, Sacred Heart aims to do more than this. Children are susceptible to so much at an early age and we aim to (alongside their parents/ carers) grow and nurture them. What is delivered at Sacred Heart is much more than simply a curriculum; it is also about the ‘lessons’ and life experiences children receive as part of their school experience with involvement from the wider community.

When designing our curriculum, we have thought carefully about all the ways in which pupils learn, not just in lesson time but during every aspect of the school day and outside of this where possible.

Subjects have been mapped out across the school from EYFS to Year Six to enable:

• Progression to be easily seen between year groups and stages of the year (in both skills and knowledge)
• The opportunity to cater for all styles of learners and be inclusive of all of our children
• A broad and balanced curriculum to be delivered
• Enriching and engaging opportunities to be planned alongside everyday teaching and learning
• High expectations to be consistent across all year groups and for all learners
• Opportunities to revisit key concepts and build on the children’s knowledge of these. Appropriately selected concepts will be re-visited year on year to further embed children’s knowledge and understanding.
• Opportunities to make use of and learn about our local context and will address typical gaps in pupil’s knowledge and skills.
• The opportunity through monitoring and feedback to adapt our curriculum provision to ensure it continues to meet it’s intent.

With our curriculum implemented we will achieve our ethos of ‘Together we live and learn, we play and pray’.