Our Curriculum
Our curriculum empowers children on their academic journey as courageous and engaged learners.
Our Curriculum has been designed to ensure each and every child can succeed with stimulating and awe-inspiring learning experiences with our three Christian values at its heart: Courage, Service and Respect.
It is bespoke to the needs of the pupils at St Mary’s, not only by focussing on appropriate subject-specific knowledge, skills and understanding as set out in the National Curriculum, but also by developing individual and collaborative learning experiences, a positive growth mind set, a sense of responsibility, and the emergence of encouraging children to see beyond their own horizon.
The three core beliefs on which our curriculum is built are:
- Learning is a change to long-term memory.
- Children should experience a wide breadth of study and have, by the end of each key stage, long-term memory of an ambitious body of procedural and semantic knowledge.
- Children learn with a purpose, bringing learning to life.
Our Curriculum is driven by engaging topics and much emphasis is placed on cross-curricular work where this enhances learning. Learning will normally involve first-hand experiences gained from visits made to places of interest including use of our local environment, and from experiences generated within school, including from expert visitors. Children will be involved in learning to develop a range of skills such as investigation, classification, prediction, and observation. Children will also be taught to make appropriate use of a range of secondary sources such as reference material.
A unique feature of St Mary's is an approach to learning that we call Freeflow. In essence, this is a way to support pupils to be independent in their learning, take responsibility for tasks and take pride in achievements. It also allows them to make mistakes and learn from them in a safe environment — something which is crucial for the development of confidence and self-esteem.
Curriculum Subjects
Based on the requirements of the National Curriculum, we strive for a curriculum which embraces challenge, creativity and nurtures a thirst for understanding.
Our curriculum is planned in exciting integrated topics over a 2-year cycle. The curriculum overviews for each class can be found on the links below.
You can find out about what your children will be learning in each subject by exploring each subject in the Curriclum Subject drop down on the right hand menu of this page.
The school day offers many opportunities and ways to learn that go beyond the academic curriculum: