Our Curriculum Intent

At Saint Francis Xavier Catholic Primary School, we endeavour to inspire a love of learning within all of pupils and strive to enable all of them to master the objectives of the National Curriculum in order to prepare them effectively for the next phase of their education and their life beyond school. 

In order to achieve this, we implement a knowledge rich curriculum within which knowledge is specified and sequenced progressively from our Nursery through to Year 6 so that when pupils encounter new knowledge it builds upon what has come before as they work towards clearly defined end points within each subject. At the start of each topic, we plan engaging starting points in order to inspire pupils' enthusiasm, engagement and attention for each unit of work. Within each subject, knowledge is organised around the key concepts within that discipline which children will encounter multiple times as they move through school in order support them with encoding knowledge in long-term memory. The children encounter content multiple times within a unit of work and across the curriculum with teachers planning explicit opportunities for repetition, review and retrieval practice to enable pupils to remember more knowledge in the long-term.

Where relevant, the children are encouraged to make links between what they have learned in different domains of the curriculum and complimentary units of work across different subjects are strategically sequenced to support children with making links and embedding learning into long-term memory. 

We pride ourselves on implementing a broad and balanced curriculum teaching the full range of the National Curriculum Programmes of study with an appropriate amount of curriculum time committed to teaching each subject and all subjects taught to a high standard. Our curriculum is designed to reflect the Catholic Character of our school, our school context and locality with the children having multiple opportunities to learn about and to learn within our local area. Within our curriculum we plan specific opportunities to develop pupils' knowledge and experiences beyond the National Curriculum in order to develop their cultural knowledge and character. Our curriculum is an entitlement for all pupils regardless of their starting point, teachers endeavour to ensure that all pupils can access the full curriculum at St Francis Xavier. 

At St Francis Xavier we recognise the important of strong English skills, spoken language, reading and writing, as the tools through which pupils to unlock the rest of our academic curriculum. As a result, we prioritise the effective teaching of Early Reading, taught through the Read, Write Inc. phonics scheme, and strive to enable every child to become a skilled, enthusiastic and passionate reader. Time for reading instruction is ring-fenced every school day in every year group. Vocabulary is taught explicitly within every subject and displayed in the children's classrooms in order to support children with accurate application and encoding these words into long-term memory and all adults strive to consistently model high standards of spoken English. Our pupils 'learn to read' and 'read to learn' across the curriculum, by being given access to high quality texts as a learning tool across the curriculum. Furthermore, we recongise the importance of practice and reading frequency in enabling pupils to become effective speakers, readers and writers. Therefore, we promote of a love of reading through our daily 'story time' sessions, weekly class library sessions, sending reading for pleasure books home, developing teacher-pupil reading relationships through weekly 1-1 reading sessions and encouraging our parents to promote reading at home. From year 4-6, all of our pupils access 'Reading Plus' an online learning programme for reading through which children take part in personalised practice of key reading skills and vocabulary. 

Through our curriculum we strive to empower all of children with the knowledge, skills and character to live their life to the fullest.