The Curriculum at St Paul’s
At St. Paul’s we are committed to putting Christian values at the heart of everything we do and cherishing the individuality of all. We focus on ensuring that every child makes the best possible progress by being ambitious and providing appropriate challenge for all. This is achieved by providing excellent teaching every day underpinned by clear progression of knowledge and skills in all subjects, ensuring that prior knowledge is built upon. Careful questioning, opportunities for independent enquiry and encouragement of collaborative work, including opportunities to explain understanding, allows pupils to deepen learning. Across the curriculum, pupils are asked to explain and justify their thoughts and choices, in order to demonstrate their understanding.
We provide a broad, rich and inspiring curriculum which aims to develop a community of life-long learners. We promote acquisition and understanding of vocabulary through a text rich literacy programme and a focus on key vocabulary across all subject areas. We provide opportunities for our pupils to demonstrate their knowledge through regular low-stakes testing, and the use of concept maps to start and end new topics. We find opportunities for pupils to work with others across the school to demonstrate that we are all on a learning journey together, such as our whole school reading groups. Our curriculum is carefully adapted by staff to ensure that all pupils have access to the full curriculum and we focus on high quality first teaching, with interventions taking place within the classroom wherever possible. We pride ourselves on being an inclusive school that works closely with the families of pupils with SEND to ensure that their individual needs are met. Further information about this can be found here. We also work hard to ensure that our curriculum promotes strong outcomes for all and is designed to represent the diversity of our community (for further information please see our Equality Objectives here).
We encourage pupils to develop a curiosity and interest in the world around them by providing opportunities in all subject areas for them to ask questions and allowing us to adapt learning in response to these. We plan regular experiences to enrich the curriculum, such as: museum visits, workshops and visits to places of worship, which allow our pupils to put their learning into context. We make use of the surrounding area by visiting historic local sites, such as Hampton Court Palace, but also take advantage of the ease with which we can take our pupils into Central London. These experiences also help us to prepare our pupils for the next step in their education, teaching them about planning journeys and safe use of public transport which may be necessary when they transition to secondary school.
We promote positive learning behaviours, finding opportunities to recognise and praise these within the classroom (see link below). We promote the principles of ‘Growth-Mindset’, educating our community on the importance of learning from mistakes that we make and not setting ourselves a ceiling in what we could achieve. We look for opportunities to promote resilience, demonstrating to the pupils what this actually looks like in their learning and encouraging pupils to see being challenged as a positive experience. We use Collective Worship as an opportunity to explore positive learning behaviours further, and draw on examples linked to these behaviours within the bible too. We share these lessons with the parents through use of weekly 'Values Videos' (which can be viewed here) which ensures that the same messsages are being heard and explored across our whole community.
We believe that physical and mental well-being are essential for all members of our community. The Daily Mile is an important part of our daily routine and is used as an opportunity to improve physical fitness as well as a time to be quiet, focus and reflect. We build in regular opportunities to educate the pupils in ways to develop and sustain positive mental well-being and annually work with the other local schools to ensure that this is being promoted across the wider community building positive relationships for our pupils with others their own age and with the schools that they may move on to for the next part of their education. Alongside all of this work, we also provide a range of extra-curricular activities for pupils to take part in to develop their individual talents and interests further. We review these regularly to ensure that the clubs on offer are representative of the current interests of the pupils within our school.
Provision of this rich and varied curriculum will support our pupils in becoming active citizens throughout their lives and in the world. We ensure that as our pupils move through the school, the links between previous and current learning are made, enabling them to view their time at our school as a 'learning journey'. The carefully planned progression of knowledge and skills enables us to ensure that our pupils are prepared for each transiton through the primary phase and later into seocndary school too.
If you would like further information about the curriculum at St Paul's, please contact us via: office@sph.rbksch.org
