St John' s Church School VA

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Intent:

Our Curriculum has been designed to ensure each and every child can ' live life in all its fullness' by offering stimulating and awe-inspiring learning experiences with our Christian values at its heart. We have looked carefully at the National Curriculum and through the lens of our Christian Values have designed a curriculum that is purpose-built for our community.

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The inner curriculum centres on the skills and attributes needed to flourish morally and spiritually. This creates security and space for its community to think and be challenged academically.

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Strong behaviours are encouraged through our three school rules;

Be Ready, Be Respectful and Be Responsible

We ensure that our curriculum meets our children’s needs, not only by focussing on appropriate subject-specific knowledge, skills and understanding as set out in the National Curriculum, but by modelling the virtues given to us by Christ, developing and building learning powers, developing a can-do attitude, a sense of responsibility and service so that they become well-rounded, kind people. There is a strong emphasis throughout the school on reading from the initial building blocks of phonics, through to building fluency. We develop a confidence in comprehension and an understanding of what is read and above all fostering a “Love” of reading. This is underpinned by our work on vocabulary and oracy.

 

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Implement:

The design of the curriculum centres around a “Big Question”. This creates meaning and purpose with real-life situations often being brought to the front as well as abstract concepts. The curriculum content allows for some very local aspects to be studied. Pupils have a voice in its design through the initial practice of gathering 

K W L’s (What do I Know? What do I Want to know? What have I Learnt?)

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Through quality teaching of knowledge, skills and vocabulary across core and foundation subjects, all children will be challenged to be inquisitive, compassionate, courageous and creative learners. 

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Subject leaders have mapped out the knowledge that children will acquire whilst at our school through knowledge organisers, they have devised skills journeys to ensure progression and looked at how their curriculum area can facilitate the learning of our inner curriculum. They have worked with the inclusion team to ensure that all areas of the curriculum are accessible to and to ensure equality.

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Curriculum Knowledge organisers are created for children to share with parents at the beginning of each ½ term. These are used as an assessment tool too. Class working walls create a journey of learning that helps the children to reflect on and to embed their learning.

 

The inner curriculum consists of weekly forest school sessions that give children opportunities to influence their own learning through age-appropriate and progressive themes. Each class engages in weekly strive sessions, strive helps us to assess children’s signals and see how we can support their emotional well-being. PSHE is at the core of this inner curriculum and we follow the Cambridge Curriculum but mould it to our “Big Question”, this is also enhanced with resources to ensure the

well-being and digital safety is covered explicitly.

 

Effective learning characteristics including being resourceful, reflective, resilient and reciprocal will drive teaching and learning. This is a strong aspect of our STEM curriculum.

 

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Impact:

Our children have a confident set of skills, knowledge and Christian values, which can be used to get ahead in education and life more generally. In short, they are learning more, remembering more, enjoying more and developing more as spiritual, social and emotional beings. Thus enabling them to be ready for their next stage in education. This effectiveness is monitored through; 
 

• Attainment and progress measures.

• Curriculum leadership, 

• Data challenge meetings 

• Peer observation

• Pupil voice and student council feedback

• Behaviour logs

• Attendance