St Peter's Curriculum
As a community where, “Jesus is at the Heart of all we do” we support our children to grow in faith, learn and achieve. We believe that each child is unique, a gift from God and by working in partnership with home, school and parish we are able to nurture all our children so that they are able to reach their full potential.
St Peter’s is a vibrant, welcoming place where our faith is lived out in our daily interactions with each other, our prayer life and aspiration to be like Jesus, our ultimate role model. Our curriculum seeks to provide our children with as many opportunities as possible to embrace their personal strengths, challenge themselves to be the best they can be, developing confidence, independence, ambition and an understanding of how they can make positive contributions each day in school and then to the wider community and society.
St Peter’s curriculum is broad, balanced and academically rigorous. It is designed with knowledge at its heart, a strong vocabulary base across all subjects and regular opportunities for our children to reflect, revisit and recall their learning. Our intention is that our curriculum promotes a long term love of learning and understanding of the wider world. Progress is evidenced as our children know more and remember more.
Our Home Learning Journals support links between learning at school and home and our ‘Book Looks’ provide opportunities for children to share their knowledge with an audience and celebrate all their hard-work. We have used research-based theories to support the thinking behind our curriculum planning, that includes how memory works and the idea that knowledge is 'sticky’; the more children know, the easier it is for them to build Schemas-rich webs of knowledge.
Here at St Peter’s, we strive to create an environment where children develop a lifelong love of learning, in an inclusive environment where all have access to the rich cultural inheritance that our nation and the wider world has to offer. In doing so, it is our aim to give them the skills that they need to be successful during their time at St Peter’s and beyond.
Our curriculum reflects our differences and the different ways we learn and is planned to be, relevant and consistent, providing structured strategies that support our children to understand their learning, make connections and retain knowledge. These strategies are evident in the daily practices throughout our school. Each child is valued as a unique individual and their education is tailored to get the best out of them.
Whilst recognising the need to provide a well rounded curriculum with a focus on the core subjects, in particular reading, we are passionate about enriching the curriculum through our teaching of art, design and technology, computing, sports and many other areas. We use our extensive grounds to further support our children’s mental health and love of nature, looking for meaningful ways to incorporate learning beyond the classroom into our curriculum. Our children have frequent opportunities to learn outside of the school grounds in the form of the many trips that we arrange each year. Alongside this, the children take part in ‘Enrichment Friday’ which seeks to broaden their learning and helps them to discover new passions, talents and interests. These weekly sessions range from life skills, such as cooking, sewing, sign language and first aid as well as inspirational speakers and careers advice etc.
At Peter's, we deliver and meet all statutory requirements of the National Curriculum and deliver all subjects as follows:
- English,
- Mathematics,
- Science,
- Religious Education,
- Computing,
- Geography,
- History,
- Physical Education,
- Art and Design,
- Personal, Social and Health Education
- Music.
Children in Key Stage 2 learn a modern foreign language (MFL), which is French.
We have have designed our curriculum so that our children recognise individual subjects but are also make aware of the links between subjects, developing a deeper understanding. Children will often intentionally revisit topics within subjects more than once in their time at the school so that they have the opportunity to retrieve previous knowledge, build on this prior understanding and widen it further.