Curriculum Implementation Statement

Our Curriculum at Our Lady & St Patrick’s Catholic Primary School is carefully designed, organised and planned for depth of learning.

All our learning begins with the National Curriculum, which sets out the requirements for our learning in all subjects and year groups. The National Curriculum underpins all our planning, to ensure coverage and progression across school.

At Our Lady & St Patrick's, our definition of progress is the widening and deepening of essential knowledge, skills, understanding and learning behaviours.  We implement our school curriculum to ensure that children are not merely covering content, but achieving a depth to their learning, which enables them to use their skills and understanding in all areas of the curriculum.

Our careful curriculum design and planning means that we build in many opportunities for repetition and practice of essential knowledge, skills and understanding, in every subject. This ensures that children are able to revisit previous learning, which allows them to gradually develop a deeper understanding of the skills and processes within subjects, at their own pace and in the best possible way for each individual child.

Our curriculum is meticulously designed and planned to move the nature of children’s thinking to a higher order deep level of understanding rather than just acquiring new facts and knowledge.

At Our Lady & St Patrick’s Catholic Primary School careful analysis and discussion about our pupils’ backgrounds, life experiences and culture has helped us to design a curriculum with four key priorities underpinning every subject area.

We believe that by focusing on the following key priorities our children will be ready to successfully meet the challenges of the next stage of their education and their lives.

Our curriculum priorities are:

• Aspiration – we aim to provide experiences which show children the wide range of possibilities available for their future.
• Initiative – we aim to offer experiences which help them to become independent and resourceful learners.
• Environment - we aim to provide experiences which help our pupils value their environment and understand their responsibilities towards sustaining their local and global environment.
• Experience - we have designed and planned our curriculum to offer a range of experiences which contribute to every child receiving a full and rich curriculum. The range of experiences we offer support and champion our culture, and ensure that our children benefit from a full range of academic, spiritual, moral, social and cultural activities.

These activities enrich their lives and those of our whole school community. We are proud that our curriculum offers our children the skills, confidence and self-belief to lead a happy and fulfilled life, by encouraging them to aim high and work towards their goals and dreams in life.