Curriculum 

Curriculum Intent: (Sequence and Sense Making)

We are creating an ambitious curriculum where children ‘know more and remember more.’ They are able to use and apply the knowledge, skills and learning acquired over time to make connections, ask questions and build understanding, making sense of the world around them.

When planning our curriculum, we recognise the very wide social and economic backgrounds of our families, therefore there is a sharp focus on the principles of scope and adaptation, coherence, rigour and clear sequencing.Scope and adaptation:
The St Francis de Sales curriculum has been devised to provide a meaningful and well-adapted curriculum which enables our children to see themselves reflected in it and to also learn about cultures, beliefs and places that they may not have come across before. Our curriculum caters for the needs of all of our pupils taking into consideration their developmental needs both academically and socially. Such an approach will allow us to ensure progress for all pupils – especially those who may have one (or many) barriers to learning.
Our design of the curriculum takes into account the 20% of pupils who may have barriers to learning due to;

• Identified special educational needs
• Speech and language & social communication difficulties
• Social, emotional and mental health issues
• Broken family structures
• Low parental engagement/parenting skills
• Social housing (e.g. overcrowding)
• Social services involvement
• Low attendance

As a result, our curriculum is designed to reinforce and revisit the basic skills our children require, while offering rich and engaging experiences.

Coherence:
The curriculum is logically organised and contains explicit vertical, horizontal and diagonal connections across subjects, year groups and key stages. Learning experiences build on from each other, focusing on activating prior knowledge to build pupils schema and embedding new information.

Rigour:
Long and medium-term planning ensures that the curriculum is rigorous in its content and outcomes. Substantive (established facts) and disciplinary (methods of working) knowledge are planned for in equal measure, alongside the use of semantic knowledge (facts that pupils need to understand) and procedural knowledge (things they need proficiency in).

Clear sequencing:
The curriculum is the progression model for knowledge and skills. At St Francis, our curriculum has been carefully mapped and sequenced to ensure that learning is reinforced and happens over time through repetition and revisiting, enabling pupils to build their understanding of larger concepts.