At St Cecilia’s, our curriculum supports our school’s mission in empowering pupils to become safe, happy, healthy, and fulfilled adults who actively engage with the world, encapsulated by a knowledge and love of Christ and of our Catholic faith. With that as our destination, we create a curriculum journey that supports all, no matter their personal circumstances, to reach it. It is enriched with opportunity for Catholic Social Teaching and personal development. During their time at Saint Cecilia’s, we prepare our pupils for when they will live and work with others in adult life. We do this by providing a friendly, disciplined social environment and the support of a caring community. We nurture in them an understanding of rights and responsibilities, respect and tolerance for difference, sensitivity towards the feelings and concerns of others and an active commitment to social justice. We want to show them how to be good citizens who contribute positively towards the wider community.
The curriculum is our progress model. By this we mean that it describes the journey our pupils need to go on to know more and remember more; the journey needed to produce better outcomes and beyond, in all subjects, in their character, in their awareness and in their appreciation of good. Our curriculum is driven by knowledge, for which there are five key principles in which we believe:
- All pupils are entitled to equal opportunity within our explicit curriculum. This is the ‘best deal’ for our pupils. Therefore, we strive for consistency in the knowledge delivered and the order it is delivered in
- Without assuming what has been learned at KS2, we understand that knowledge is sequenced as a ‘path’ that can make learning a subject ‘easier’ by ensuring, where applicable, that what pupils learn next is connected to what they already know, so that they could build connected knowledge, so knowledge expands, and complexity is increased over time
- We consider the prior knowledge required to make learning the future knowledge more likely and we are not afraid to ‘track back to solid ground’ when we find evidence of dysfluency
- We check for the understanding of knowledge and concepts in a variety of formative and summative ways before moving forward, pupils reflect and improve based on this feedback, reteaching and/or addressing of misconceptions
- We revisit essential knowledge regularly through planned and thoughtful activities for the retrieval and interleaving of knowledge and concepts
Our curriculum enables children to acquire and extend essential skills in literacy, numeracy and communication whilst developing personal, learning and thinking skills, developing resilience, independence, curiosity and engagement.. Our approach to teaching and learning is intended to stimulate pupils’ curiosity, imagination, and creativity. All our students will be equipped with the knowledge, skills and understanding to achieve as highly as possible at Key Stage 4 which in turn will allow them to access the courses and qualification routes that best suit them. In determining the subjects that make up our Key Stage 4 offer we take into account the Lancashire Skills and Employment Strategic Framework. The Framework articulates the skills and employment priorities for Lancashire.
To learn more about our curriculum overview, assessment, examples of pedagogy, literacy, numeracy and to visit each curriculum area in more detail then please visit the sub menu categories. To see how personal development is intertwined within our curriculum then please visit our personal development menu.