Curriculum

 At Sacred Heart School our aim is to provide a curriculum that is both interesting and exciting and engages the pupils. We make sure that the curriculum encourages a life-long love of learning and a call to pupils to have an enquiring mind. Through our curriculum, we strive to develop the skills, knowledge and learning attitudes of our pupils so that they may become the best that they can be. Our Catholic values help children to develop their social and moral code, as they build their sense of uniqueness and self-worth as an individual. We believe all children deserve the opportunity to nurture their individual talents and to achieve their true potential. We aim to encourage the children to develop their understanding of their local and national heritage and their role in modern Britain today. We encourage them to embrace all that multi-cultural Britain has to offer and develop their understanding of the global world, within which they are a citizen of the 21st Century. The guiding principles of our curriculum are built around our desire to elicit greater learner involvement in their work. This can only be achieved if we have a good understanding of what the children already know and what they are inspired to find out about. We use the information gained from pre-learning tasks and attention grabbing activities as a spring board for the plans that we make. We have paid careful attention to how our curriculum is organised in order to ensure that there is coherence to what we teach. This allows our pupils to build upon their underlying skills and knowledge across the curriculum and to draw links between their learning across the year groups. To this end we regularly conduct curriculum reviews in order to assess the progression of skills and knowledge that runs throughout the school to ensure that there is an interesting and exciting curriculum that engages the pupils. We have ensured that our staff have a strong subject knowledge in order to be able to deliver the curriculum and draw on the expertise of specialist teachers where necessary to further enhance what we have on offer. We have made sure that we know where each and every child’s skills and talents lie by ensuring that the teachers know when and where it is useful to assess. We do not over rely on formal testing but have a range of strategies in place to inform us of what each child needs to do next in order to progress. We have used the time that we have available to us wisely in order to create a timetable of lessons that ensures good coverage of all curriculum areas. We punctuate our timetable with the use of immersion days for specific curriculum areas. Children enjoy digging deeper into subjects and topics for full days to deepen learning and to apply skills purposefully. We block topics to make the most of teaching time and allow for deeper subject knowledge to be acquired as well as incorporating school trips to inspire and supplement learning. What is taught at Sacred Heart is so much more than the formal education. It is also about the message our children receive through their experience of being at our school. The unplanned parts of the curriculum that take place outside lesson time are just as rich and varied. Talk to any of our pupils and they will tell you how they learn from each other, the pride they have in their care and concern for others, the high expectations for their behaviour, the community action projects undertaken by every class and the termly focus on virtues and values that allows them the opportunity to:

‘Grow in Wisdom and in Grace.’