September 2023 saw the official launch of our new Curriculum across the school.  Our Academic Curriculum, supported by our Enrichment Curriculum, offers a full, broad and balanced whole school curriculum, rich with cultural capital.

The aims of our curriculum:

• We aim to be like Jesus the teacher, where all children learn to be good, inquisitive learners, capable of making our world a better place. Like Jesus our shepherd, no child will be left behind.
• We want our children to know more and remember more
• We aim to provide our children with a broad curriculum, rich with cultural capital.
• We aim to teach what is required from the National Curriculum as a minimum.
• We aim to create a curriculum that is teachable, clear and practical where possible.
• We want all of our children to progress so that they can tell us about their own progression in learning.
• We want our children to be able to tell us why they are learning what they are learning.

Diversity

and

Inclusion

A diverse and inclusive community, we will learn about our brothers and sisters around the world and embrace difference, benefitting from the wealth of culture, custom and tradition that exists with our school and beyond! 

Curriculum drivers shape our curriculum breadth. They are derived from an exploration of the backgrounds of our pupils, our beliefs about high-quality education and our values. They are used to ensure we give our pupils appropriate and ambitious curriculum opportunities.  At St. Peter’s, our drivers ar Catholic Social Teaching, Resilience, Sustainability, Our Community and Diversity and Inclusion.  

Cultural capital gives our pupils the vital background knowledge required to be informed and thoughtful members of our community who understand and believe in British values.  You can find our our specific curriculum enhancements on our class pages.

Curriculum breadth is shaped by our curriculum drivers, cultural capital, subject topics and our ambition for pupils to study the best of what has been thought and said by many generations of academics and scholars.

Our curriculum distinguishes between subject topics and threshold concepts. Subject topics are the specific aspects of subjects that are studied.

Threshold concepts tie together the subject topics into meaningful schema. The same concepts are explored in a wide breadth of topics. Through this ‘forwards-and-backwards engineering’ of the curriculum, pupils return to the same concepts over and over, and gradually build understanding of them.  This helps our children to know more and remember more.

For each of the threshold concepts three milestones, each of which includes the procedural and semantic knowledge pupils need to understand the threshold concepts, provide a progression model.

Knowledge categories in each subject give pupils a way of expressing their understanding of the threshold concepts.

Knowledge webs help pupils to relate each topic to previously studied topics and to form strong, meaningful schema.

Cognitive science tells us that working memory is limited and that cognitive load is too high if pupils are rushed through content. This limits the acquisition of long-term memory. Cognitive science also tells us that in order for pupils to become creative thinkers, or have a greater depth of understanding, they must first master the basics, which takes time.

Within each topic, pupils gradually progress in their procedural fluency and semantic strength through three cognitive domains: basic, advancing and deep. The goal for pupils is to display deep understanding by the end of each topic by using their knowledge to complete a task.

As part of our progression model we use a different pedagogical style in each of the cognitive domains of basic, advancing and deep. This is based on the research of Sweller, Kirschner and Rosenshine who argue for direct instruction in the early stages of learning and discovery-based approaches later. We use direct instruction in the basic domain and problem-based discovery in the deep domain. This is called the reversal effect.

Also as part of our progression model we use POP tasks (Portrayal of Progress) which shows our curriculum expectations in each topic.