Our Curriculum

At St Stephen’s CE Primary School, we offer a curriculum, which is broad, balanced and which builds on the knowledge, understanding and skills of all children, whatever their starting points.

Our curriculum incorporates the statutory requirements of the national curriculum but also takes into account the needs and interests of our pupils – so that everyone can reach their full potential within a happy, stimulating and secure environment.

Our aims:

• deliver a broad and deep curriculum, accessible to all children.
• provide a caring, friendly, inclusive and inspiring atmosphere where the children are happy and attain the highest academic levels possible.
• encourage children to think critically when faced with unfamiliar and uncertain situations, in order to independently reach considered judgements.
• help children develop an enquiring mind and the ability to make reasoned judgements and choices.
• impart shared values and maintain a Christian atmosphere, throughout all our school activities, within a Christian context.
• develop in the children a sense of self-confidence, self-respect and self-discipline.
• help children to recognise the needs of others and to be able to work with others in a spirit of cooperation and appreciation.
• Help children to identify opportunities for charitable acts.
• help children to listen with concentration and intent to understand.
• recognise children’s different talents and different needs and to provide appropriate individual and collaborative learning experiences, within which children will achieve success and gain confidence.
• work closely with parents and all others involved with the school in order to achieve these aims.
• develop responsible global citizens who make a difference as future leaders.
• Take every opportunity to promote our school values of peace, friendship, service, kindness, thankfulness, forgiveness, resilience, courage and respect.

Curriculum content

The curriculum is designed using a cross-curricular approach, as we know this enables our children to make connections across their learning, leading to deeper learning experiences so that the learning is purposeful and meaningful.

We have developed our curriculum in line with our 5 Year Vision. In particular, we recognise that we want our children to understand their place in the world and to understand that they can make a difference. We believe our children have the potential to change the world and be future leaders for positive change – in their family, community, country or the world.

In order to capture this, we promote Global Citizenship throughout our curriculum.  A global citizen is someone who is aware of and understands the wider world - and their place in it. They take an active role in their community, and work with others to make our planet more equal, fair and sustainable. Through our Curriculum, we encourage our young people to develop the knowledge, skills and values they need to engage with the world. It enables pupils to think critically about world issues and to develop an awareness of the impact our own actions can have on others and ourselves.

We make links in our planning across the six global citizenship themes throughout our curriculum.

These six themes are all inherently linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals .

Here are some examples of how these links are made in our planning:

Subjects

Although our pupils are clearly successful in Maths and English, we place equal importance on all subjects. We are determined to find each and every child’s talent and believe we can only do so through giving children many opportunities.

In order to do this, we use specialist teachers, where possible. At St Stephen’s we have specialist teachers in MFL, Music, PE and Computing.

For further information on each subject, including curriculum overviews and progression maps, please follow the link below.