Curriculum Intent

Jesus says, "I have come that they may have life and have it in all its fullness."

John 10:10

Our school curriculum is rooted in our distinctive Christian vision for children to “live life in all its fullness”. 

Our curriculum seeks to develop the whole child: their character, their learning and their future ambitions. 

Our curriculum reflects our high expectations for all of our children and our aspiration for them to achieve high levels of progress.

Through our whole school curriculum, we aim to:

We do this by providing a broad and balanced curriculum with discreet units of work in every subject. Each unit of work contains the knowledge and skills that we have identified as essential in our school. The knowledge and skills are sequenced and progressive in each subject across both Key Stage One and Key Stage Two.

Curriculum Implementation

At St James and St John, there are key features of our pedagogical approach to implementing the whole curriculum that go across all subject areas.

COLLABORATION 

We aim to ensure that there are opportunities for collaborative learning across the curriculum with pupils working in pairs, groups or as a whole class. We know that being able to share and talk about your learning has a proven impact on pupil understanding and progress. 

CLEAR PURPOSE AND SUCCESS CRITERIA 

The purpose of a lesson is shared through a clear decontextualised learning intention with clear associated success criteria, which are created with the children where possible.

LEARNING PRESENTED IN SMALLER STEPS 

Wherever possible, learning is broken down into smaller steps so children are not overwhelmed by too much information. 

QUESTIONS 

Teachers use a range of questions to engage children, check their understanding and to deepen their learning. 

MODELLING 

Adults and peers model successful example outcomes across the curriculum so children have a clear picture of what to aim for in their independent or shared tasks. 

RESOURCES TO SUPPORT AND SCAFFOLD 

We use a range of resources to provide support for children to access and complete learning tasks. These could be concrete resources or written scaffolds or prompts. 

INDEPENDENT PRACTICE 

We ensure that there are opportunities for independent practice in both practical and written tasks.

EXPERIENTIAL AND PRACTICAL LEARNING 

Across the curriculum, we emphasise the importance of experiential and practical learning tasks as essential in contributing to a broad and balanced curriculum. These could be learning tasks within the classroom or opportunities to engage in learning outside of the school. 

Curriculum Organisation

Our curriculum is organised into 3 distinct topics of learning, which group each of the subjects and the subject-specific skills and knowledge to help deepen and connect learning.

These topics help organise specific skills and knowledge in the subjects of:

• History
• Geography
• Art and Design
• Design Technology
• Computing

These 3 thematically organised topics are supplemented by focus weeks of learning about science, international relations and diversity, religious festivals and celebrations, healthy living and personal, social, health and economic development.

The teaching of English, Mathematics and Science is kept discrete, with skills used within subjects when appropriate. English is taught with the use of high quality texts, which are usually thematically related to the overarching topic.

Religious Education is also taught discretely, using the LDBS scheme of learning.

PSHE, Music, PE and Spanish are all taught as separate subjects, following individual schemes of work.