Our Curriculum

At St Joseph’s, with God’s guidance, we love, learn, respect and forgive.

Curriculum Statement

The whole curriculum is everything which the child experiences during his/her time in school. It includes those aspects which are difficult to quantify; play, assemblies, social relationships, happy working atmosphere as well as the teaching and learning situations in class time.

In this school we aim to encourage the development of the whole person. We seek to make the curriculum appropriate to the child’s interest and aspirations. We recognise the individual needs and abilities of each learner and we strive to support the development of intellectual, emotional, cultural, moral, spiritual, physical and social qualities.

Our school whilst delivering the statutory content of the National Curriculum, places a very creative thematic approach to learning. Our school Curriculum is challenging, exciting and enriching and has been designed to inspire and motivate all our pupils regardless of background or ability.

Our curriculum has been developed to create children who:

  • Are inspired learners.
  • Are good citizens.
  • Are independent thinkers.
  • Have enquiring minds.
  • Are great friends.

This is the philosophy of how we want to work and learn. These aims underpin all of the learning that takes place in our school.

At St Joseph’s we use a range of resources to deliver an exciting and successful learning programme for our pupils. These include our thematic curriculum from Lancashire planning, “Read, Write, Inc”. for phonics, the “Accelerated Reader” reading scheme, The White Rose scheme for Maths and “Come and See” for Religious Education.

Read Write Inc.

Our school uses Read Write Inc. Phonics for our children in EYFS to Year 2 and for our children in Years 3 and 4 who need to catch up.

The four Read Write Inc. programmes are carefully matched to the new curriculum, giving your children the best chance of success in the national tests. They show teachers, teaching assistants and parents step-by-step how to teach all children to become fluent readers, confident speakers and willing writers.

Read Write Inc. Phonics is used by over a quarter of the UK’s primary schools. It is a comprehensive literacy programme, weaving decoding, comprehension, writing and spelling together seamlessly. Ruth Miskin developed the programme during her time as a headteacher in Tower Hamlets. She believes that in order for a school to be successful, every headteacher needs to adopt a consistent whole-school approach to teaching reading, writing and spelling. Fidelity to the teaching programme, rigorous assessment, tracking and one-to-one tutoring ensure that schools guarantee progress for every child.

For information and tutorials on how to support your child learning to read go to: www.ruthmiskin.com/en/parents (external link).

Accelerated Reader

AR is a reading program that helps teachers support and monitor children’s reading practice. Students pick books at their own level and read it at their own pace. There are two main parts to this programme which work together to help students improve as readers.

1) Star Reading test – an online test used to measure your child’s reading level. The test uses multiple-choice questions which continually adjust depending on the students responses. Students are the given a ZPD range (Zone of Proximal Development) between 0.5 and 13.5.

2) Accelerated Reader – includes over 30,000 books with each book assigned three scores to help your child make a suitable choice; book level, points and interest level.

White Rose Maths

We follow the White Rose progression. This is a scheme of learning that has been carefully planned and developed over several years to meet the national curriculum aims. This is a widely adopted scheme nationally and one that encourages children to become fluent in a concept, before learning and applying reasoning and problem solving skills.

Curriculum Enrichment

The curriculum is enriched by using visits and speakers whenever possible. Each year there is the opportunity for all children to enjoy a theatre experience and there are various sporting events which they attend. We endeavour to make as many links with the other schools in the St Thomas Aquinas Catholic Multi Academy Trust as possible through a variety of curriculum opportunities.

There are opportunities for the children to take responsibilities within their class and the whole school. Children have opportunities to be Head of their House, Eco-councillors and School Chaplains.