Our Curriculum
St Peters is a distinctively Christian school, at the centre of a thriving community, where children discover God’s love as we equip them to grow in resourcefulness, resilience, respect and the courage to aim high. Through outstanding learning opportunities, and our inclusive approach, our vision is to unlock the potential in everyone.
We believe that curriculum design is an act of service; it must serve the needs of the children in our unique setting. Through our broad and balanced curriculum, we support children to identify their potential and the confidence to fulfil it. We aim to give our pupils the intellectual curiosity to go beyond the boundaries of Henfield.
As a whole school community, we have thought very carefully about what we want every child at St Peter’s to be able do, know and experience by the end of each phase of their primary school journey. This can be seen in our End of Phase Child documents. Our bespoke curriculum builds on these non-negotiables.
The content of our curriculum is drawn from the National Curriculum and is faithful to each subjects’ vision. However, we have made conscious decisions about quality over quantity. We know that a love of learning comes from the opportunity to spend time with a subject; digging deeper not skimming through. We give our pupils time to produce beautiful pieces of work in which they can aim high, embed skills, develop resilience and take pride in. Improving writing outcomes for us is a priority and research tells us that the opportunity to dwell, and become knowledgeable means that children write with more confidence and accuracy. If they are clear about the content, then they can focus on the complex work of crafting their sentences.
In our curriculum design we have also decided to align our teaching and learning with whole school themes. The Autumn term is entitled ‘Looking Back’ because it focuses on history. The Spring Term is ’Looking Forward’, focusing on Science. The Summer term is ‘Looking Around’ focusing on Geography. Within this structure we have whole school topics at specific points across the year. These are World War II to coincide with Remembrance services, Space in early Spring when the night sky dominates our day and Easter to co-create our school’s Easter Service at church. This deliberately promotes inter year group learning both for teachers and children.
To make learning meaningful and relevant, all our projects are planned around an age-related enquiry question, and we look for opportunities to work towards an authentic outcome. We also seek to interconnect subjects, so they enhance each other. An example of this is to express the understanding of ‘which day in Holy Week is the most important?’ (Year 4 RE) by making a stop frame animation (Year 4 Computing) to be used during the Easter Service at church (authentic outcome.) Other subjects are better suited to stand alone most commonly this is topics in Maths, like fractions.
Concepts are identified and threaded through each project for example work in our World War II project is underpinned by concepts such as truth, peace and community.
