Our aim is for children to leave our school with a love of God and with strong values of respect for one other. We intend to do this by ensuring our Catholic ethos is at the core of our curriculum. This helps children to develop their social and moral code, as they build their sense of uniqueness and self-worth as an individual. We have excellent links with the Parish community. All classes undertake a range of charitable acts and outreach work in the local and wider community so that children see themselves as part of the community and develop social responsibility.

Safeguarding is everyone’s business and this culture pervades our school. Children come to St Mary’s to be safe, to be happy and to learn. We teach children how to keep themselves safe online and in the real world. We develop children’s social and emotional understanding so that they can be friends and manage their own conflict. We teach children about mental health and wellbeing  so they develop an understanding of their own mental health requirements and can grow up to have healthy minds and bodies. We invest time and resources in to children’s playtimes allowing them to develop imaginative play, be creative and have fun with each other.

We want children leave us as lifelong learners who are resilient in their approach, are responsible citizens and show independence in their attitude and so we instill in them a belief in a Growth Mindset. This helps to raise children’s aspirations so they have confidence to set themselves goals and achieve them.  Our ‘Effective Feedback’ policy means that children receive regular high quality feedback to help them improve. Teachers use metacognition strategies to help children understand. Children set themselves targets and use metacognition to help achieve them. We talk about the ‘power of yet’ and that ‘mistakes are magic’. Our classroom environments are safe places where children aren’t afraid to get things wrong. Through our curriculum, children encounter positive role models and develop new skills, which not only inspires them to be high-achieving academically but also empowers them in their choices later in life. We ensure children are regularly active throughout the week and we provide them with opportunities to compete in a wide range of sports. This increases confidence in pupils and develops life skills such as teamwork, determination, perseverance and the ability to deal with losing. Our focus on transition points helps prepare children for the next stages in their education.

The driving force of the curriculum is reading. Through our strong phonics provision, we aim to get all children reading fluently as quickly as possible, to open the reading gateway to the rest of the curriculum. We intend to develop a love of reading and a passion for books by providing opportunities to read a wide range of genres for different purposes. We intend to prepare our children as world citizens of the 21st Century. In order for this to be achieved our children need high levels of literacy and numeracy. Therefore, we ensure quality first teaching for all our pupils with daily maths and English lessons where all pupils receive the appropriate amount of support and challenge to allow them to make progress. Our curriculum is designed to give children opportunities to think and talk through our use of Kagan strategies. This allows us to develop co-operative learning, achieving active engagement and equal participation by all children across the curriculum. This makes learning fun and develops children’s social skills. We invest time and resources in to our subject leads so that we have a strong curriculum. All subjects have knowledge and skills progression documents so that the curriculum is well sequenced and helps children to progress. We encourage children to make links and transfer their skills and knowledge from one curriculum area to another. We use Thinking Maps so that the children can visualise their thinking and create concrete images of abstract thoughts.  This enables the children to reach higher levels of critical and creative thinking. A wide range of ‘hooks’, educational visits, visitors in to school and exciting theme days ensure children’s learning is memorable and engaging. We also use ‘Retrieval Practice’ strategies to achieve our ultimate aim to make learning stick so that children know more and remember more.

We teach children that we play an important part in our family, school, local and global communities. We talk about what it means to be a good citizen and think about how they could contribute to society in a positive way. We find out about issues around the world, debate current issues and look at how other people’s lives, faiths and families may be different from our own. This links to teaching about British Values. Our work around our ‘Community’ school value helps children to develop respectful attitudes to everyone around them.

Our motto is ‘Let Your Light Shine’ and this is lived out daily in school. We encourage all children to nurture their individual God-given talents and aspire to be the best that they can be. This means that we have high ambition for all children. We are an inclusive school and work hard to ensure that disadvantaged children and those with SEND are given every opportunity to develop their skills and talents in the same way as others. We track barriers to learning so that they can be addressed and we provide additional opportunities for developing cultural capital where necessary. We offer a range of clubs to allow children to develop their talents and interests. We also build in opportunities for performance to develop confidence and give a sense of achievement.