The Trust's aims for a Top Class Curriculum will deliver our vision and enable our mission. St John's has designed its curriculum based on the Trust's agreed principles or learning guarantees.
Our curriculum:
Curriculum Enrichment
Our children are entitled to experiences which support their physical, mental, social and emotional development, as well as prepare them for secondary school and future adult life. We have developed a series of activity passports, showing a rich variety of experiences, which every child will participate in before they leave St John's.
Our curriculum:
- has Catholic life, RE and Gospel values at its centre;
- is fully inclusive;
- is built on the theory and practice of learning, namely Rosenshine's principles;
- allows for learning to be more explicit, permeable, progressive and linked between subjects;
- ensures continuous provision in and beyond the classroom;
- has clear progression of content, knowledge, skills and understanding in all year groups and across the school;
- has blocked teaching sequences for each subject;
- has quality outcomes;
- ensures constant practise and use of equipment;
- ensures meaningful home learning;
- is taught by teachers with expert subject knowledge;
- ensures learning which children can retain, recall, apply and explain.
Curriculum Enrichment
Our children are entitled to experiences which support their physical, mental, social and emotional development, as well as prepare them for secondary school and future adult life. We have developed a series of activity passports, showing a rich variety of experiences, which every child will participate in before they leave St John's.
Our Topics
Every year group learns through a series of topics, designed to build on subject knowledge and skills year on year. Most subjects are taught through these topics, with age-appropriate schemes of work for Personal, Social and Health Education and Relationships and Sex Education (Diocesan schemes: Ten Ten and Life to the Full) and PE (Arena). Maths and phonics are taught discreetly from the topic learning, using objectives from the National Curriculum and the Letters and Sounds guidance respectively. In RE, we follow the Diocesan scheme, Come and See. See the Catholic Life page for more details on our RE, PSHE and RSE provision.
Early Years
Year 1
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Our Impact
We want our children to gain in knowledge and skills across all areas of the curriculum and to be fully prepared for their next stage in education. We want our children to understand what it is to be a historian, an artist, a musician etc. The staff respond to children's learning outcomes every session, assessing through quizzes, talk buddy activities and a range of other informal learning checks. They continuously adapt their planning, their teaching and changing provision to meet children's needs. In addition, children complete a variety of assessment tasks, both at the end of each subject and each topic. Each half term, teachers make a decision as to whether a child is making great progress and if they are working securely within the subject curriculum area for their year group.