Explore Curriculum
At St Michael’s Catholic Primary School, our bespoke Explore Curriculum is built around the National Curriculum, enriched to reflect the children and community we teach in. As a Catholic school, our ethos and school values are at the heart of everything we do.
Our Mission Statement reflects this:
With Jesus we can Achieve what we Dream and Believe
Intent
Our Explore Curriculum has been designed by St Michael’s Catholic Primary School to provide an ambitious and exciting curriculum that is bespoke to the needs of our children. As a school, our curriculum sets the highest of expectations for every child. It equips learners with the knowledge and skills to achieve academic success, preparing them for future life and learning as both a member of our community and as a global citizen.
Every child is unique and important; they are at the centre of their learning. We provide an inclusive, quality education which celebrates the rich diversity of our school. Our Explore Curriculum is inspired by our multicultural community, allowing our children to feel represented and celebrated within their learning.
Our curriculum strives to support our learners to reach national standards and beyond whilst instilling a life-long love of learning. Reading is steeped throughout our Explore Curriculum as we maximise opportunities to delve into books across all subject areas, inspiring children to leave our school with a passion for books and a zest for reading. In pursuit of knowledge, our children acquire rich, aspirational vocabulary which allows them to explore new topics and articulate their learning.
In our quest for knowledge, our learners are encouraged to challenge themselves to conquer new learning. We use a wide variety of high-quality resources to assist us in delivering this bespoke curriculum including specialist teachers, visits and curriculum enhancement opportunities, developing our pupils’ cultural capital whilst nurturing their individual talents.
In order to secure the best outcomes for our learners, our Explore Curriculum is focused on scope, rigour, coherence and sequencing. The cumulative effect of being steeped in a knowledge-rich curriculum, which builds progressively year on year, ensures that our children know more and remember more.
The distinct core themes that underpin our Explore Curriculum are equality, diversity and aspirations. Children will learn about their right to equality, embrace diversity and be ignited to aspire and achieve what they dream and believe.
At St Michael’s, we are explorers of our own learning.
Implementation
Our curriculum is implemented through bespoke, high-quality long-term and medium-term plans, crafted by subject leaders with the support of the curriculum leadership team. All plans ensure full national curriculum coverage and include:
– sequential learning
– core vocabulary
– opportunities for reading
– relevant and engaging learning activities
– regular opportunities for challenge
– application of knowledge and skills to a wider context
– a pre-learning task to assess prior knowledge and inform subsequent
– teaching- a post-learning task to demonstrate children’s acquired knowledge from the topic
Our whole-school teaching and learning approach is rooted around Rosenshine’s Principles of Effective Instructions. This offers pupils a consistent, research-informed style of teaching to secure meaningful learning and agerelated outcomes. Our leadership team recognises the importance of highquality CPD with a proven track record for success that will directly address our school improvement journey. All staff have been provided with an extensive professional development programme, with a particular focus on our teaching and learning approach, with the ultimate aim of improving pupil outcomes. All subject leads take an active role in driving their subject forwards successfully, developing a strong subject knowledge to become experts in their curriculum area.
We firmly believe that assessment is a driver for effective teaching. Staff regularly use diagnostic, formative assessment and feedback to inform future planning and identify pupils who require additional precision teaching to move their learning on. Summative assessments capture pupils’ attainment and progress at key points throughout the year.
Impact
Being able to measure the impact of our curriculum is critical to its success. By summarising attainment and progress made by pupils, along with using the data to refine and improve our curriculum provision, we ensure that our pupils are receiving a high-quality education. We will measure impact by monitoring teaching and learning.
This will include:
– pupil voice to articulate learning
– professional discussions with staff – looking at pupils’ books
– analysis of data (both internal and published) – formal lesson observations
– informal learning walks
– implementing a coaching programme
– a focus on displays and learning environments
– monitoring planning, marking and feedback
We will use the outcomes of our monitoring to summarise the impact of our curriculum to date and inform future actions for development. The leadership team and subject leaders will be responsible and accountable for measuring the impact and reporting to governors.
Curriculum Resources
Just click a button below to View any document, you will then have the option to Download or Print the file. You can access all of our policies and reports on the website. Please contact the school if you would like any paper versions of our documents.
