Curriculum Overview

Curriculum Intention

To provide a broad and balanced curriculum which meets the requirements of the National Curriculum and engages our children
To support every child to become a confident and enthusiastic reader with a love of books.
To ensure children build a broad knowledge base as they progress through school
To embed learning and skills by using them in a range of lessons and contexts
To ensure children have opportunities outside school which enrich the curriculum
To support all children to make good progress from their starting points
To underpin our teaching with our Christian Values
To provide high quality Collective Worship and RE which support all curriculum areas and promote our distinctive Christian Ethos
To offer opportunities which challenge children to achieve greater depth of understanding
To embed teaching about British Values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect and tolerance of those of different faiths and beliefs throughout our teaching and daily life in school.

Curriculum Implementation

At St. Benedict Biscop we provide a broad and balanced curriculum which supports our children to develop their intellectual curiosity and become lifelong learners. We empower our children by teaching a knowledge rich curriculum with core skills revisited and embedded across school.

We have designed a curriculum which provides all children with a broad range of experiences across the whole of their time in school and prepares them well for their next step in learning and later life. We are very proud of our distinctive Christian ethos and this underpins our curriculum across the school. We ensure that through teaching the children about our Christian values we provide them with skills for life in Modern Britain.

Our curriculum provides children with opportunities to learn the core skills of reading, writing and mathematics in engaging contexts and has opportunities for them to apply these skills across a range of subjects. In Early Years we start teaching our children about the sounds that letters make through their daily phonics lessons following the Letters and Sounds programme.

Reading has a high priority across school, the teaching of reading develops our children to become lifelong readers with the ability to use their reading to deepen their understanding of other subjects. In EYFS and KS1, teachers teach early reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds revised. Please see our phonics page for more information and links to resources to support your child at home. Teachers will send children home with a reading book which reflect and support progress in the phonic phase children are currently working within, alongside a book for sharing which will develop reading for pleasure. The reading for pleasure book is for an adult to read to them. As the children move through KS2, we use Treetops as a structured reading programme until they are fluent and enthusiastic readers, again they will also select a reading for pleasure book from their classroom selection and will be encouraged to recommend books they enjoy to their peers. Once we are confident that they are confident readers they will independently select challenging books that help them to expand their knowledge of a range of authors and vocabulary. Our teachers have a wealth of knowledge about children’s literature and will be happy to discuss and recommend books which your child may enjoy.

Curriculum Impact

Each term we assess children in all areas of the curriculum to measure the impact of our teaching on their outcomes. We ensure that our children make good progress from their starting points and teach in a way that encourages children to become independent and resilient learners who thrive on challenge. Each year the objectives they are taught build on their prior learning and extend their knowledge.

Through this curriculum we ensure that we teach to the government requirements. All our teaching objectives are taken from the National Curriculum document published by the Department for Education. Our religious education is delivered as set out in the Statement of Entitlement for Church of England schools. We provide children with broader experiences through our Forest School and a range of clubs and trips. Our children tell us that they enjoy coming to school and they enjoy their learning.

We use Class Dojo to communicate with parents about the learning which is happening in our classrooms. This helps our parents to support their children at home and can prompt discussions about their learning. At times during the year we will invite parents and carers into school to find out more about what we have been learning in class.

If you would like to know more about our curriculum please speak to your child’s class teacher or contact the school office.