Curriculum
Please click on the links below to view each curriculum page.
(These images have been designed and drawn by our pupils)
CURRICULUM POLICY
We are united in the belief that together we can inspire all learners to dream, persevere and achieve so that we can change lives for the better, now and for future generations to come.
Intent
Holy Family aims to deliver an exciting, broad and balanced curriculum that is rooted in Catholic values and is underpinned by our School Mission Statement:
Jesus said, "Let the children come to me." We live and learn and love in His way.
Through our engaging curriculum, we ensure that pupils are provided with the knowledge and skills needed to prepare them for the next phase in their education and their lives and to understand their responsibility in contributing positively to our world. Our curriculum is driven by the need to prepare our children for lifelong learning - we want them to know and see the power of education and learning and know how transformative it can be in changing lives for the better. We want our children to have the knowledge and skills to be the change they want to see in the world.
Our bespoke Building the Kingdom curriculum reinforces Catholic Social teaching and SMSVC and interweaves with the National Curriculum.
Learning is collaborative and therefore accessible and meaningful to all pupils. Our teaching, across the range of subjects, allows pupils to experience well-sequenced lessons that inspire them to ask questions and want to know more. This enables pupils to reflect on previous learning through retrieval practice, acquire new knowledge and skills; and embed these.
We aspire that our pupils will leave Holy Family with a love of learning and a resilience to the challenges that their continuing education might bring.
Implementation
At Holy Family Primary School we teach a bespoke curriculum that fully incorporates the National Curriculum, whilst reinforcing Catholic Social Teaching.
Our curriculum design is based on evidence from cognitive science and these three main principles that underpin it:
- Learning is most effective with spaced repetition
- Interleaving helps pupils to discriminate between topics and aids long-term retention.
- Retrieval of previously learned content is frequent and regular which increase both storage and retrieval strength.
In addition to the three principles, we understand that learning is invisible in the short term and that sustained mastery takes time.
Our 'Building the Kingdom' curriculum design reinforces Catholic Social Teaching & SMSC, and is authentically distinctive. We explore the big questions of purpose and meaning that arise throughout the Liturgical year, and aim to engage students with the skills needed to be agents for a Spirit fueled transformation of society. We educate our children and form them to be the leaders of tomorrow, leaving them with a greater sense that they can make a difference.
Our children are taught through Kagan collaborative learning structures for Engagement and Achievement. We use Kagan Structures to increase academic achievement, improve race relations, enhance self-esteem, create a more harmonious classroom climate, reduce discipline problems, and develop students' social skills and character virtues. Kagan Structures require every student to participate frequently and approximately equally. We see that the more pupils interact with their peers and with the curriculum, the more they'll learn. Pupils are taught in such a way that they are enthused with their learning and have a desire to become independent learners and achieve their best.
Staff benefit from continuous collaboration, quality CPD and dialogue about pedagogy which impacts directly on the quality of their teaching.
Impact
The curriculum at Holy Family is well planned to enable a wide range of engagement, not only within class but in providing out of class opportunities to enable children to develop themselves as learners and encourage each child to be as independent as they can be. Questionnaires to the pupils and parents allow the staff to regularly review and assess the impact that the curriculum is having.
Through Kagan, all pupils are actively engaged, they pay attention, they're motivated, they learn more, and the learning sticks.
Pupils leave Holy Family Primary with a secure knowledge of the academic content; with the understanding of how to be socially, morally, spiritually and culturally responsible and aware; how to make positive contributions to the local community and to the world and how to endeavour to be the best that they can be.
We aim for all our children to leave Holy Family respectful, skillful, and ambitious, with a thirst for life and all it has to offer.
“A good school provides a rounded education for the whole person. And a good Catholic school, over and above this, should help all its students to become saints….” Pope Benedict XVI, 2010
