Holy Cross Catholic Primary School Curriculum Intent, Implementation and Impact

At Holy Cross Catholic Primary School, we have designed an ambitious curriculum which is built upon our mission statement, Living, Loving and Learning, Through the Light of Christ.

At the heart of our school are our set of core, Gospel values: Respect, Forgiveness, Truth, Kindness and Equality. These underpin our curriculum and the ethos of the school. Through our core values, we foster an environment where the emotional, physical, academic, social, moral, spiritual and cultural development of each child is considered.

Intent

At Holy Cross Catholic Primary School, we believe deeply in the importance of helping our pupils develop as a whole person – happy and ready to take the next steps into their education and lives beyond Primary School, regardless of their starting point. We firmly believe that everyone is entitled to an ambitious curriculum and our curriculum design is accessible for all, including children with SEND and disadvantaged backgrounds. We celebrate our unique qualities and differences. To achieve our aims, we teach the curriculum in a meaningful and engaging way which means that children can sequentially build knowledge and learn vital skills to drive their understanding, creativity and individuality. We believe every child should be given the opportunity to create, compose, perform, visit, experience, participate, know, understand and review as part of a cultural and creative curriculum. We aim to celebrate and embrace the diverse home backgrounds of the children, recognising the wealth and variety of experiences that our learners bring with them to school.  

Our curriculum provides our children with the best educational start in life. It considers the needs of a 21^st Century child and is ambitious in providing our children with the knowledge, skills and learning behaviours required to become successful life-long learners.

The Holy Cross curriculum is designed to:  

· Develop strong characters in order to be resilient and cope with adversity.  

· Develop creative individuals who collaborate and co-operate and can solve problems seeing failure as an opportunity to learn.  

· Develop pupils who can think critically and care about their learning so they always do their best.  

· Develop pupils who care about their role as part of a family, community and the wider world; encouraging them to feel part of, and to contribute positively to fundamental British values.  

· Ensure all pupils have high aspirations.  

· Develop a thirst for learning for all pupils 

The primary purpose of our curriculum is to guarantee a successful learning experience for every child. With this in mind, we are committed to ensuring that every child is developed to their full potential:  

· Every child will be educated to the highest possible standard, as set by the Department for Education and through our enhanced curriculum provision. 

· Every child, in every lesson, will be provided with opportunities to: be engaged in, challenged in and process their learning. 

· Every child will be provided with opportunities to increase their self-esteem, motivation and aspirations.  

· Every child will be encouraged to be enterprising and entrepreneurial in order that they may succeed in an ever-changing job market.  

· Every child will be provided with opportunities to experience the wider world as a core part of their curriculum.  

· Every child will be taught about budgeting and financial management in order that they may succeed in an increasingly unpredictable financial world.  

Implementation

We strive to maximise the use of our local area, the thriving city of Liverpool, to enrich the curriculum – teaching positive risk taking and creativity that helps pupils progress in all their subjects and on a personal level. The curriculum is supported through enrichment experiences, educational visits and visitors that really bring our learning to life. Every aspect of the curriculum is underpinned by a range of texts, vital in our promotion of a language rich environment to support the increasing communication needs of the children in our school. Books are selected to reflect equality, alongside spiritual, moral, social and cultural needs. Thematic and subject displays across the Key Stages, are designed to promote a wider variety of vocabulary and subject specific language. 

Our daily formative assessments and effective use of timely feedback through live marking, means that teachers and pupils always know exactly how much progress they are making and where they may need more help.  

Four closely related curricular attributes – scope, rigour, coherence and sequencing – are the measures of our curriculum quality.

Our curriculum is –

-ambitiously broad in scope, allowing pupils to gain a multi-faceted understanding

-meticulous in rigour, and responsive to up-to-date scholarship in curriculum areas and related fields including current questions being pursued

-highly coherent, making intricate links within and across subjects so that nothing is in isolation but is supported and enriched both horizontally and vertically

-very carefully sequenced, so that children build upon knowledge and obtain an informed understanding of concepts, building comparisons and reaching critical judgements

For the scope, coherence, rigour and sequencing to achieve its full benefit for pupils, the substantive content must be taught with ‘high-leverage’ activities, so that pupils think hard about the substance itself, so that they assimilate and retain material efficiently and so that they gain confidence from their fluency in foundational concepts, terms and reference points. In this way, vocabulary will become extremely secure, with the range of vocabulary that pupils recognise growing all the time and creating resonance as pupils’ encounter it again and again, both consolidating that vocabulary and freeing up memory space for pupils to make sense of new material.

Cultural Capital

Cultural Capital is the essential knowledge that children need to prepare them for their future success. It is about giving children the best possible start to their early education. 

At Holy Cross, we see Cultural Capital as the accumulation of knowledge, attitudes, habits, language and possessions that enables individuals to demonstrate their cultural competence and social status. Our school plays a crucial role in developing this through immersing children in dance and music, visiting theatres, galleries and historic sites and by introducing them to literature and art.

Embedding cultural capital into our curriculum is a way of closing the gap between children from differing socio-economic backgrounds by ensuring that children from all backgrounds have the same opportunities in society to achieve their full potential.

Enhanced Curriculum

Our enhanced curriculum aims to run alongside and compliments the National Curriculum, but aims to broaden the horizons of our children and links to our school's value. The opportunities offered aim to provide our children with unique experiences outside of the National Curriculum. 

We broaden horizons by developing global learners, which underpins all of our values, by planning for opportunities to be aware of the wider world and its current issues and to understand and respect cultural diversity and differences with an understanding of how the world works and encourage participation in the community at a range of levels, from the local to the global. We teach our children to make the world a more sustainable place and to take responsibility for their actions. We do this by providing learning linked to:

-International/Cultural understanding

-Respect for others and our differences

-Community participation (local and global)

-Sustainability and environmental issues

-Challenging stereotypes

Impact 

Pupils leave Holy Cross Catholic Primary School with a secure understanding of the academic content of the curriculum; with the understanding of how to be socially, morally, spiritually and culturally responsible and aware; how to make positive contributions to the local and global community and how to endeavour to achieve their best. We aim for all of our children to leave Holy Cross Catholic respectful, skilful, ambitious and with a thirst for learning, life and all it has to offer.