Curriculum

Curriculum Intent

At St Brigid’s Primary and Nursery School, we value each child as gift from God with a unique potential for learning. Our aim, through the curriculum, is to enable every pupil to participate fully within our school, local and wider communities as responsible, self-confident citizens and we actively promote the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical qualities of all pupils.

We believe that an effective curriculum offers knowledge, skills, understanding and progression. Our curriculum is designed with these principles in mind: it is focused on the faith development of our pupils; it is personalised, reflecting the background and experience of our pupils; it considers international issues, setting learning in global contexts wherever possible; it celebrates diversity to emphasise unity; it is rooted in authenticity and context so that learning is relevant.

We place the highest priority on excellent teaching in all areas of the curriculum and we know that our children’s experience of school is dependent on high quality teaching opportunities that address not only ‘what’ they learn but also ‘how’ they learn it.

All stakeholders are part of the development of the curriculum design and, to ensure that we maintain and further develop curriculum quality, we will focus on the following:

• Language rich opportunities to allow pupils to develop their communication skills
• READING as an opportunity to explore and learn
• Local context and filling the gaps from pupils’ backgrounds
• Focus on subject disciplines
• Ensuring that the curriculum is progressive from age 2 to 11
• Having a clear purpose for assessment that allows pupils to regularly ‘check-in’ with their learning
• Listening to our pupils
• Reviewing and evaluating curriculum design
• Clear curriculum leadership and ownership

Engaging – Our aim is that children enjoy learning and embrace the challenge and opportunities that new learning brings and we know that high levels of engagement leads to good progress.

Enriching – We prioritise high quality teaching to ensure that our pupils have access to innovative, stimulating and inspiring learning experiences within the classroom on a daily basis. However, our aim is that the curriculum is enriched in a variety of additional ways and, across the year, all pupils have access to out of school trips, a range of visitors, cross-curricular links and purposeful use of the environment.

Unique – We recognise that not only is each child an individual but also each class and each member of staff have unique interests, skills and talents. Our curriculum is designed flexibly to meet the needs of these groups. We also understand the uniqueness of our school and we know that we need to provide daily opportunities for our pupils to develop their language and communication skills so that they are well equipped to access all aspects of the curriculum. With this in mind, we aim to ensure that every subject has a real focus on language within it.

Using the Early Years Foundation Stage and National Curriculum as a basis, age-appropriate progression in knowledge for each core and foundation subject has been identified. This has been mapped out to ensure that coverage of identified knowledge is secured across KS1 and KS2. We carefully select the sequence of what, when and how knowledge is taught and subject leaders work actively to review this aspect regularly.

If you require any further information about the school curriculum then please contact the school.

See Progression Maps for all subjects below: