Curriculum
Curriculum Statement
Last term we began to review our whole school curriculum and its vision as a school development; this continues to be a priority for 2022-2023.
Curriculum Rationale
The staff and governors of St Oswald’s have a clear vision of the education we provide for our children. We believe that the curriculum should inspire and challenge all children and prepare them to be lifelong learners; we believe that the curriculum is a powerful tool that promotes equality of opportunity, develops aspirations, encourages a willingness to explore, take risks and develops a love of learning. Every child is encouraged to succeed through our broad, balanced and enriching curriculum, based upon strongly held Christian values preparing children for life in modern Britain. The Catholic ethos is central to all that we do in school and our vision for loving, learning and growing in faith is paramount to all that we do.
We are passionate in our belief that the curriculum underpins all of our provision as a school, and that through it the children should receive outstanding spiritual, moral, social and cultural guidance and, as a result, make excellent progress socially and academically, equipping them to become the good citizens and leaders of tomorrow. We strive to ensure that there is a broad range of enrichment opportunities including free-to-all extra-curricular activities which promote learning, personal growth and development.
The 2014 National Curriculum differs from previous versions in a number of ways. It encourages a deeper learning, the mastery of fewer objectives and through high quality teaching, children will learn and remember securely, the knowledge, understanding and skills across all curriculum areas that will equip them for the future workplace. It fosters embedded learning and allows children to demonstrate what they know, can do and understand by practising fluency, reasoning and problem solving independent from direct teaching.
Our mission in St Oswald’s is to tailor the curriculum specifically for our children, to plan and delivery to suit the needs of the learners. We work hard to continue to create and develop a curriculum that harnesses all of the statutory objectives creating school schemes of work and topics, which are relevant and stimulating to children in the locality they live and teaches them about the wider world, breaking down cultural and physical barriers.
Narrative
Through self-evaluation, we realised that there are additional opportunities that we could offer to enhance and improve our curriculum; the focus is on moving towards developing a knowledge rich curriculum, utilising the local area’s strengths to their maximum potential.
We strive to be forward thinking, keeping abreast of national developments and educational research, offering our staff training opportunities to inform our curriculum planning and further refinement.
We will continue to closely review and refine our curriculum during 2019-2020 to ensure coverage of the programmes of study in the best possible way as we move to a new national inspection framework in 2020. During this transitional period, there is a clear action plan to support this area for development.
This is a long term whole school area of development and will form a major part of the school development plan in 2019-2020.
Our action plan will focus on:
- Curriculum leaders will work with subject leaders to clearly identify end of year milestones for each subject area i.e. identifying what the end of year expectations for each year group.
- Subject leaders will then be tasked with identifying the elements of the programmes of study that teachers will be assessing at the end of a topic through means of a big question. Children will demonstrate how much they have learnt and remembered of the knowledge and skills taught.
- We will ensure planning is firmly focused on delivery and content to best teach the unit of work. With a focus on further developing teaching sequences to include opportunities for formative assessment to ensure key knowledge, skills and understanding are embedded.
- To further enrich our curriculum we will be mapping out all enrichment opportunities to support the topics being taught e.g. visitors / trips etc.
- Curriculum leads will continue to provide as many opportunities as possible for the children to expand their knowledge of our local area – in line with Liverpool Promise.
Ongoing priorities:
- Continue to deliver quality learning opportunities for all of our children.
- To consider our curriculum delivery model.
- Subject leaders further develop their own subject visions in line with the whole school vision.
- Re-addressing the mapping out of the topics and themes with the progression of knowledge, skills and understanding and identifying the vocabulary and key concepts taught by each year group.
- Planning for each topic/theme will initially start with a ‘Big Question’ this will be the focus of the key learning during the taught unit. At the end of the unit, an assessment task will be set evaluating all the concepts taught.