Intent
The curriculum at St Mary’s is underpinned by our aims, values and purpose: to provide rich, varied and authentic, first hand learning experiences and memorable moments that will stay with our children for the rest of their lives and inspire them to become life-long learners. It aims to develop the whole person, providing them with knowledge, skills and understanding to succeed in life.
We pride ourselves on celebrating all the subjects and ensuring they each have an equal place in our curriculum. It is our mission to ensure that every child has an excellent education. Our curriculum motivates, challenges and excites all of the pupils at our school. Children are active learners, who engage in teamwork and problem solving to develop their knowledge and skills.
We ensure that contexts for learning are tailored to our rich local area and we use our own grounds, thus capturing the interests of our children and allowing children to learn about themselves and the wider world through investigation, research and enquiry.
Our school is very fortunate to be located in a rural location with the historic Shawbury Moat, River Roden and RAF Shawbury nearby and and rich historical landmarks on our doorstep. Classes take the opportunity to regularly visit the local vicinity which brings the curriculum to life for many children.
Our curriculum is topic based, usually with one topic per half term and the topics selected by subject leaders have been chosen because we feel that they will interest and excite the children in their learning. We aim to link subjects where possible, creating meaningful links so that contexts for learning are real, thus stimulating the children’s interests. When it is not possible to create meaningful links between subjects, topics are taught discretely. A huge focus is placed upon ensuring that all children develop the necessary co-operation skills and are able to listen to and respect the ideas and viewpoints of others.
Keeping our children healthy both physically and mentally is really important. PE is taught for 2 hours per week to each class and all children take part in the daily ‘Walk and Talk’ and after school clubs. We aim to support learners to develop resilience, confidence, independence and we practice mindfulness on a regular basis to all children in school. We believe that to embrace the challenges of creating a happy and successful adult life, pupils need knowledge that will enable them to make informed decisions about their wellbeing, health and relationships. Therefore, sex and relationship education is taught to all children in school regularly in an age appropriate way. As part of our curriculum, we also promote the spiritual, moral, social, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils, at school.
Our curriculum also prepares learners for life in modern Britain and the wider world, equipping them to be responsible, respectful, active citizens who contribute positively to society and who appreciate diversity.
An Adaptive Curriculum
We are very conscious to adapt our curriculum to ensure that learners can access each lesson and build their knowledge and skills base.
We do this through a four-stage process:
- Anticipate barriers
- Plan to address them
- Assess for learning
- Adapt in the moment
Considering research-based practice by the Education Endowment Foundation, we also make suitable adaptations by subject to ensure equity of access.
The St Mary’s Way
We recognise that, in order to create a safe environment for all our pupils where they can maximise their learning, we must maintain the highest possible standards of pupil behaviour. We have developed a ‘curriculum for behaviour’ which we call The St Mary’s Way. This document (below) sets out the rules and routines that we explicitly teach pupils. We believe this helps to build pupils’ character by supporting them to develop the habits and attitudes that will enable them to succeed in later life.
St Mary’s Way – Behaviour Curriculum
How to find out more information about our curriculum
Please view our individual subjects. Here you will see our vision for each subject, more about the knowledge and skills that are taught in each year group for every subject and how this progresses as a child moves through the school and how we celebrate each subject as part of our enrichment programme.
Impact
Evaluating impact is an important process that helps us understand the effectiveness of the curriculum, teaching and interventions. In order to effectively judge impact, we must:
- Be clear on the outcomes pupils need to achieve
- Establish a baseline of capability in terms of those set outcomes (what could the pupil achieve)
- In addition, look at non-academic evidence such as attendance data
- Plan a logical, evidence-based approach to intervention (both for the child, and to support teaching)
- Evaluate the quality of the curriculum, and of teaching & learning
- Analyse pupil progress towards the set desired outcomes.
- We then feed all of this into our school improvement cycle to continue to improve and develop the way we teach our children.
Please click on the links below to access our termly overviews for Cycle A and B:
St Mary’s LTP Cycle A and B