Curriculum Overview

At Plympton St Mary Infants and Old Priory Junior Academy , we aim to provide a broad and well-balanced curriculum that will inspire our pupils and motivate them to learn. 

Our curriculum follows the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum supplemented by opportunities to provide enrichment, inspire curiosity, and support the development of every child’s academic, social, communication and wellbeing needs. We believe that we have a responsibility to educate for the whole child, preparing children for their futures as flourishing members of the community. 

As schools in St. Christopher’s Trust, we are committed to building flourishing communities. To ensure that our curriculum meets the needs of our community, our staff body collaborated to design five anchors which take into account the curriculum that we want to offer our children, gaps for pupils in our locality, and our vision for an inclusive, inspiring curriculum.       
Within Early Years the curriculum is designed to recognise children’s prior learning from previous settings and their experiences at home. We respect that children have different starting points and strive to provide a nurturing environment for all. We do this through providing a range of child-led, hands-on learning opportunities. We provide many first hand experiences to underpin the children’s knowledge, with the aim of broadening their understanding of the world around them. We believe that first experiences of school should be happy and positive, enabling a lifelong love of learning. In order to provide this climate we use positive language to build a positive sense of self. We provide an environment which will enable children to trust in themselves and in their peers, building resilience, ambition and integrity.
 
In addition to providing an exciting curriculum for our children, we place a high value on the core subjects and weave our work in reading, writing and maths, across our teaching. We ensure that children become effective communicators and are confident with numbers. 

We use a number of schemes of learning to enable us to deliver the National Curriculum in ways that will achieve our curriculum aims. Our foundation curriculum is based around a Geography or History topic each term with links being made to other foundation subjects where appropriate. Subjects are taught discretely, following our curriculum progressions. Teachers will take advantage of opportunities to explore particular current topics of local, national or global interest where this is appropriate. Whilst most subjects are taught each week, for some subjects, such as Art and DT, we recognise the value of giving children a block of time to produce a final outcome. 

We are inclusive schools and value the many opportunities for learning that working with a diverse range of pupils brings. We aim to provide high quality teaching that is differentiated to meet the needs of the majority of pupils. Some of our pupils will require provision that is additional to, or different from, our core offer. Provision for our children with SEND is outlined in our SEN Information Report and Policy. 

In both of our schools Collective Worship plays a central role in bringing our community together, and embedding our ethos and  values. Parents have the legal right to withdraw their children from daily acts of worship, but are asked to discuss the matter first with the Headteacher. We hold a weekly Celebration Assembly, including parents, across both schools to recognise achievements throughout the week. Our values focus on ensuring that children develop as rounded individuals. At St. Mary’s our Christian values are Friendship, Thankfulness, Respect, Forgiveness, Perseverance and Trust. Our core value is Love, reflecting our overarching ethos ‘Love in all we do’ (based on 1 Corinthians 16:14)