Curriculum
Our Curriculum Intent
Our curriculum at Our Lady of Lourdes is primarily focused upon ensuring that pupils are supported and challenged to gain knowledge, skills and attributes to ensure that they are ready for their next stage of education. Ultimately, we recognise that we are preparing our pupils for lifelong learning and effective contribution to the diverse society in which we live. As a faith school, we thread Catholic values throughout our curriculum to ensure a moral focus for our pupils, living by our school motto:
“I can do great things with God’s love”
Our Lady of Lourdes teaches a curriculum through a subject specific approach to learning, making links across subjects wherever possible. Acknowledgement of short and long-term memory capacity as well as cognition overload features strongly in the planning and provision stages of our curriculum so that it is accessible for all children.
At Our Lady of Lourdes we are:
- Skilled readers
- Confident writers
- Mathematicians
- Scientists
- Historians
- Geographers
- Musicians
- Artists
- Linguists
- Theologists
- Athletes
- Designers and Technologists
- Inclusive and diverse.
We want our children to have no limits to what their ambitions are and want them to embody our core values both academically and spiritually.
The purpose of our curriculum is to:
- Produce successful learners who can communicate effectively
- Develop confident learners who are resilient to failure
- Promote responsible and effective contributors to society
- Encourage principled, reflective empathetic individuals
In developing our school curriculum, we acknowledged the uniqueness of our school within the context of its multi-cultural demographic and our celebrated religious status. This has framed the choices of the curriculum content we have made particularly in aspects of the curriculum such as geography and history and in consideration to the famous people we celebrate across all subject areas.
We enrich pupil’s time in our school with memorable experiences and provide opportunities that may not ordinarily be accessible to some pupils. We firmly believe that it is not just about what happens in the classroom.
In order to produce effective communicators we provide many opportunities throughout the curriculum for debate and discussion – this ensures that pupils are encouraged to share their views but also are able to listen and respect the views of others within a regulated curriculum context.
We plan with the desired outcomes for learning at the forefront of our curriculum design. Every subject has clearly defined learning objectives and skill progression for key stages, year groups and individual lessons. This enables clarity of assessment for learning and determines a framework for leaders to measure curriculum performance.
Reading is a key priority within the school curriculum. There is an acknowledgement that in order to access any area of the curriculum successfully and independently reading has to be a well-developed area of learning for the pupil. We seek to develop fluency, vocabulary and a love of reading within this school. We use Little Wandle supported by Big Cat Books as our reading scheme. Links to Little Wandle can be found here: https://www.littlewandlelettersandsounds.org.uk/