Our aim is to provide our children with an engaging, exciting and empowering curriculum that equips them for today and tomorrow. We believe that childhood should be a happy, investigative and enquiring time in our lives, where there are no limits to curiosity and there is a thirst for new experiences and knowledge.

We view the curriculum as the totality of every planned/unplanned experience and interaction that pupils encounter within our school. It informs every aspect of

our practice and culture from academic content to personal development, including the drive to instil and display the Christian values and ethos.

Our curriculum is driven by the following aspects, which aim to improve the life chances of all children by ensuring each child becomes and believes that:

• I am a life-long learner
• I am a future leader
• I am a global citizen
• I am me!

Here at St Paul’s, our Curriculum is designed to inspire our children, creating awe, wonder and a love of learning. Our curriculum ensures each child is a successful learner, who enjoys learning, makes good progress and achieves well, a confident individual, able to live a safe, healthy and fulfilling life, and a responsible citizen, able to make a positive contribution to society.

Using our Curriculum Drivers to underpin the design of our curriculum, staff have tailored

what they teach so that our children have a range of opportunities and experiences to hone and develop their knowledge, skills and understanding, leading to a

curriculum that is personalised, is broad and balanced and inspires children to learn. There is high academic ambition for all pupils, rooted in our solid consensus of the knowledge and skills pupils need in order to take advantage of opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. We have carefully studied evidence of research when developing and building our curriculum and consequently leaders are confident about the knowledge and skills pupils need in order to take advantage of opportunities, responsibilities and experiences in later life, which is embedded into our curriculum.

At St Paul’s, the curriculum is designed to: recognise children’s prior learning, provide first hand learning experiences, allow the children to develop interpersonal skills, build resilience and become creative, critical thinkers. The ability to learn is underpinned by the teaching of basic skills, knowledge, concepts and values. We constantly provide enhancement opportunities to engage learning and believe that childhood should be a happy, investigative and enquiring time in our lives where there are no limits to curiosity and there is a thirst for new experiences and knowledge.

Our curriculum is designed and sequenced so that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before and towards clearly defined end points, informing what pupils need to know and be able to do to reach those points. We have created comprehensive long-term and medium-term plans and through our monitoring and evaluating cycle, we see the impact the curriculum is having on pupils.

Community involvement is an essential part of our curriculum as we celebrate local traditions, learning new skills to enable the children to take an active role in

events throughout the year. Working with the community – local, national, international is a key aspect of our curriculum as we seek to learn from and give to each community. Children leave the school with a sense of belonging to a tight knit community where they have the confidence and skills to make decisions, self-evaluate, make connections and become lifelong learners. Our pupils study the full curriculum; it is not narrowed. Pupils study a broad range of subjects, including all national curriculum subjects as shown in our curriculum intent statement and long-term and medium-term plans.

We ensure all of our pupils have access to a wide range of cultural experiences, including music and dance performances at major events, theatre, museum and gallery visits and places of worship. The curriculum also extends beyond the academic as we support pupils to develop in many diverse aspects of life. There is a strong emphasis on children’s personal development through our values, including the development of learning, thinking, personal, social and emotional skills, resilience, responsibility and respect. We put a strong emphasis on pupil voice to encourage independent and engaged learners, promoted through our school’s embedded pupil leadership opportunities. PSHE and SMSC are embedded into our curriculum planning and the ethos of the school.

Equality

Every pupil is recognised as a unique individual and we celebrate and welcome differences within our diverse school community. We aim for our curriculum to enable all pupils to have the opportunity to succeed, be safe and happy and to reach the highest level of personal achievement. To do this, we will:

• ensure that the way in which issues are taught do not subject individuals to discrimination
• use contextual data to improve the ways in which we provide support to individuals and groups of students
• monitor achievement data by ethnicity, gender and disability and action any gaps
• take account of the achievement of all students when planning for future learning and setting challenging targets
• ensure equality of access for all students and prepare them for life in a diverse society
• use materials that reflect the diversity of the school, population and local community in terms of race, gender and disability, without stereotyping
• promote attitudes and values that will challenge racist and other discriminatory behaviour or prejudice
• provide opportunities for students to appreciate their own cultural heritage and celebrate cultural diversity
• seek to involve all parents in supporting their child’s education
• encourage classroom discussion of equality issues which reflect on stereotypes, expectations and the impact on learning
• use teaching and classroom-based approaches appropriate for the whole school population, which are inclusive and reflective of our pupils.