St Alban's Curriculum

“Love One Another As I Have Loved You”

(Our Mission)

Our mission is to offer a curriculum that develops compassionate, happy, ambitious pupils and sparks a lifelong love of learning. We want to ensure that all pupils are prepared for the exciting and unknown opportunities held within their futures both as citizens of Wallasey and the world.

Intent

We aim to:

• Provide all pupils with a well-planned, sequenced curriculum which builds skills and knowledge in a way that ensures children know more and remember more and can utilise these to build future learning. This goes hand in hand with our PSHE/RHE/ RE curriculum ultimately ensuring a St Alban’s child leaves us well rounded and prepared for their next stage of learning.
• Support our children to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and truly understand what it means to ‘Love one another’ embodying this in all they do whilst here at St Alban’s and throughout their lives. 
• Create learners who achieve their individual potential, value themselves and others, are resilient and who are excited by learning. 
• Plan a range of high quality experiences for all children during their time at our school, opening up the local area and wider world and allowing them to discover what the world has to offer them.
• Promise that all children get to work with a team of staff who know them and are bothered about them. Staff who are knowledgeable and excited about what we do here at St Alban’s and who are dedicated to helping children grow in ability, confidence and independence.
• Send our children home desperate to tell their families what a great day of learning, friendship and challenge they have had that day!

Our drivers

We worked together as a school family to develop 4 curriculum drivers that shape our curriculum, bring about the aims and values of our school, and respond to the particular needs of our community:

Spirituality – helping children to embody the Gospel values, develop a deep sense of ‘self’, promoting their ability to understand and respect the thinking and opinions of others. 

Growth – helping all children to develop academically, physically and emotionally as well as growing in confidence, independence and resilience. We want our pupils to embrace change and challenge, be willing to take risks and be fully prepared for their futures. 

Possibilities – helping pupils to be ambitious, excited and hopeful about their futures and providing them with opportunities to experience leadership and responsibility. 

Community – helping pupils to become active, responsible members of our school, the locality, our country and the world. We want our pupils to see themselves as change makers both locally and globally. 

Implementation

Our curriculum is implemented through bespoke, high-quality long-term and medium-term plans, crafted by subject leaders with the support of the curriculum leadership team.

It is rooted in, and has grown from, a solid agreement between subject leaders about the knowledge and skills that a St Alban’s pupil will gain during their journey through our school and the importance of developing their resilience, physical, social and moral growth and of course fulfilling their academic potential. 

All plans ensure full national curriculum coverage and include:

• sequential learning
• core vocabulary
• opportunities for reading
• an adaptive approach to teaching
• relevant and engaging learning activities
• regular opportunities for challenge
• application of knowledge and skills to a wider context
• the use of pre and post learning tasks to inform planning and demonstrate learning has taken place
• an emphasis on long term learning – children know more and remember more

The St Alban’s curriculum aims to support every child to reach their individual potential and therefore is adapted to meet the needs of our children, families and locality.

There is a sharp focus on phonics for our younger pupils, with tailored plans and a programme of support designed for those children who do not pass the Phonics Screening Check and who may need additional help, these may be SEND, EAL or new to country.

We are committed to ensuring that all children leave St Alban’s a confident and competent reader who has developed a lifelong love of reading. Therefore reading is at the heart of our curriculum and reading opportunities are maximised across all subjects and all staff actively promote, share and nurture a real passion for reading, storytelling and getting lost in a book!

Reading is also a priority and all staff endeavour to share and nurture a real passion for reading as well as teach

Our whole-school teaching and learning approach is rooted around ‘The essential elements of effective lessons’. This offers pupils a consistent, research-informed style of teaching to secure meaningful learning and age-related outcomes.

Our leadership team recognises the importance of high quality CPD with a proven track record for success that will directly address our school improvement journey. All staff are provided with an extensive professional development programme, with a particular focus on our teaching and learning approach and subject leadership, with the ultimate aim of improving pupil outcomes. All subject leads take an active role in driving their subject forwards successfully, developing a strong subject knowledge to become experts in their curriculum area.

We firmly believe that assessment is a driver for effective teaching. Staff regularly use diagnostic, formative assessment and feedback to inform future planning and identify pupils who require additional precision teaching to move their learning on. Summative assessments capture pupils’ attainment and progress at key points throughout the year.

A range of after school activities and additional experiences such as; music lessons, fieldwork, educational visits and visitors to school, further ensure our pupils are able to unleash their creativity and develop a lifelong love of learning.

Impact

Monitoring and measuring the impact of our curriculum is critical to its success. By summarising the attainment and progress made by pupils and using this data to refine and improve our curriculum provision, we ensure that all pupils receive a high-quality education.

Children’s progress is carefully monitored through appropriate assessment. Where children are found to need additional support a variety of interventions, both academic and pastoral, are put in place to support them.

Impact is measured by monitoring the quality of teaching and learning.

This includes:

• pupil voice to articulate learning
• professional discussions with staff
• looking at pupils’ books
• analysis of data (both internal and published)
• formal lesson observations
• informal learning walks
• implementing a coaching programme
• a focus on displays and learning environments
• monitoring planning, marking and feedback

We use the outcomes of monitoring to summarise the impact of our curriculum to date and inform future actions for development. The leadership team and subject leaders will be responsible and accountable for measuring the impact and reporting to governors.