Our Curriculum

St George's CE Academy Curriculum Overview

St George's CE Academy Curriculum Overview - Nursery

St George's CE Academy Curriculum Overview - Reception

Curriculum Statement of Intent

At St George’s C of E Academy, our vision is to provide an excellent, well-rounded education which celebrates academic, emotional and spiritual achievement and prepares everyone to fulfil their full potential in an inclusive environment in God’s World. 

Rooted in the image of God, for all to love and flourish, our school: –

• values all God’s children and keeps them safe from harm;
• is distinguished by the quality of care given to all our extended family of school, home and parish;
• promotes life-long learning in the hope of God’s future for the world and supports everyone on their journey through life;
• promotes attitudes of self-reflection, mutual respect, tolerance, acceptance and responsibility;
• celebrates diversity and difference, treating everyone with dignity and recognising the ultimate worth of each person;
• aims to give every child the opportunity to develop their full academic, emotional and spiritual potential;
• promotes an understanding and appreciation of the relevance of faiths and world views and their impact on society and culture;
• builds Christian values into our ethos and enables children to encounter the teachings of Jesus and the Bible and the Christian belief in the Trinity.

Our ethos is underpinned by our Christian Values of thankfulness, peace, forgiveness, trust, friendship and hope, as well as God’s love and compassion for all. Our values are embraced by all members of the school community.

We have a planned curriculum which is rich, exciting, broad and balanced, providing opportunities for all children to flourish, both in personal and academic development. Our school’s focus on curriculum development has been carefully designed to ensure coverage, progression, a deep body of knowledge and the associated skills dependent on that knowledge, giving the children the capacity to perform as specialists in the specific subject disciplines eg, working as a historian, as an artist, as a geographer, as a scientist etc. We believe that knowledge empowers, thus making it possible for any pupil to succeed, leading to social justice. This gives the less privileged children the knowledge needed to succeed. As we offer the same ambitious curriculum for all, the children gain a strong semantic understanding in the many areas of learning. We ensure that the knowledge gained is transferable, using the skills learned in a wide range of meaningful contexts. We see this type of learning as a change to long term memory and progress as knowing more and remembering more, ‘making it stick’.

We have adopted the idea of teaching ‘threshold concepts’ as the main way of developing the long term memory. These are the concepts, stated in the National Curriculum aims and purposes of study, which capture the most important aspects of a subject. An example of this is our History concepts of chronology, investigating and interpreting evidence and communicating findings. Each subject has its threshold concepts identified and these are explored on many occasions, in a wide breadth of topics. This enables the children to build a firm understanding of them over time.

To plan for progression, each subject’s threshold concepts have been divided into three milestones, which include the knowledge the children need. Each milestone is planned in a two- year time frame, ie. end of Year 2, 4 and 6. 

We have created a culture which is personalised and are building our environment to encourage the children to do hard work and continue to always want to do hard work. This enables all children to be given the same inclusive curriculum, regardless of ability or background. It is crucial, therefore, that intervention has to start early so that any barriers to learning can be identified and broken down

Our rich curriculum provides many opportunities for the children to acquire the knowledge and cultural capital needed to enable them to develop and succeed as educated citizens. We provide the children with a variety of social skills and experiences which are needed to help them in their future lives. Our cultural capital also gives our children experiences to prepare them for life in modern British society by adopting and understanding the attitudes and qualities included in our ‘British Values’ opportunities. We also follow the aims of the National Curriculum which ‘introduces pupils to the best that has been thought and said, and helps engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement’.

We encourage all children to adopt a love of reading, both at home and at school. We have carefully selected a range of books for children in different year groups to have access to. These are identified in our school ‘Literature Spine’ and include a variety of text types, ranging from the classics to contemporary selections. Our children experience a rich diet of fiction, poetry and non-fiction texts.

One of our priorities in curriculum development is to broaden our children’s vocabulary knowledge and therefore further develop this aspect of cultural knowledge. This is a major part of learning across all subject areas.