Intent

Within the Catholic setting of our academy, we at St Teresa’s are working to prepare the children in our care to take their place in a multi-cultural society, developing in them a sense of peace, justice, respect and becoming life-long successful learners.

The academy’s curriculum comprises of learning inside the classroom and other learning beyond the classroom for all pupils. We aim to provide a quality of education that is progressive, high quality and tailored to the needs of all children.

Our primary aim is to develop a love of learning through meaningful and engaging learning experiences. As a Catholic academy, with Christ at the centre of all we do, only excellence is good enough.

Our curriculum is being redesigned and developed. Our curriculum improvement work started in September 2020 and rapid improvements continue until our bespoke curriculum for all learners is exemplary and broad.

All subjects at St Teresa’s are taught in line with the National Curriculum and using discrete lessons. This is a change from the thematic approach in previous academic years. We used staff, pupil and governor voice to move away from a thematic curriculum as we want pupils to have a higher level of knowledge acquisition.

Our improvement work also included a whole staff analysis of the barriers to learning that could impact success for our pupils. From this, we created a set of CURRICULUM DRIVERS which are becoming central to our redesign of all curriculum areas.

St Teresa’s Curriculum Drivers; Aspiration, Knowledge of the World, Communication, Preparation for Life, Community. 

Our National Curriculum delivery approach fulfils the duties from the Equality Act 2010 and the Special Educational Needs & Disability Regulations 2014.

Implementation

Our curriculum improvement work started in September 2020 and rapid improvements continue until our bespoke curriculum for all learners is exemplary and broad.

Leaders and staff worked closely with St Mary’s Academy within our SFSC MAC to allow us to develop progressive curriculum plans following a prescriptive model. .

This model includes:

A Discrete Long Term Plan,

Year Group Medium Term Plans,

A Vocabulary Progression Document,

An expectations document for staff delivery,

Assessment (including self-assessment) documentation.

We have a detailed, ambitious month by month Curriculum Development Timeline that leaders use to guide all improvements helping us ensure children are able to ‘Keep up whilst catching up’ and ‘know more and remember more’

As a parent, you will be sent a curriculum newsletter each term to explain the knowledge, vocabulary and skill your children will be learning in that term. You can download them in the Curriculum tab too.

Please take a look at our subject curriculum pages using the links above. if you require further curriculum information or paper copies of our curriculum plans, please contact 01902 558862 or email [email protected].

Impact

A range of quality assurance activities take place each week to allow subject and senior leaders to measure the impact of our curriculum delivery.

We are already seeing the positive impact of our curriculum work in children’s Maths, History & Reading.

Within a short period of time, we expect the impact of our curriculum enhancement and improving teaching and learning work to be allowing learners to succeed in key skills and develop fully rounded characters with a clear understanding of complex values like peace, justice, respect and many others. They will have a strong spiritual knowledge and faith based upon our mission statement and Catholic ethos.

Our pupils will gain solid and progressive knowledge from across the curriculum subjects and will be able to transfer knowledge and skills from one context to another.