Our Curriculum
Mission Statement: We equip our children with the knowledge, skills and attitudes necessary to flourish in an ever changing world.
School Values: Encouragement, Wisdom and Friendship
Context:
Our school serves a diverse and vibrant community who speak over 30 languages at home. This provides us with countless opportunities to ensure our children really are citizens of the world. We value every minute we spend with the children to ensure that we adhere to our mission statement so that our children continue to flourish long after they leave us. Also, with the richness of Oxford on our doorstep, we take advantage of our surroundings to reinforce learning that takes place inside the classroom. No school day is the same, and with our transient population (over 40% of our learners in Years 5 and 6 were educated elsewhere before joining St Barnabas), we explore and celebrate the experiences of all of our community. St Barnabas provides incredible opportunities that not many other schools can offer.
Aspirations:
Our mission and school values drive every decision we make. We want every child to stand out as exceptional role models of Encouragement, Wisdom and Friendship. Furthermore, we want it to cultivate a passion for learning as well as inspire curiosity, confidence and a strong sense of self worth. We expect all of our students to study the full curriculum and retain a comprehensive understanding of the subject matter. We aspire for children to have the right attitudes, sufficient knowledge, skills and cultural capital necessary for them to succeed in secondary school and beyond.
Curriculum Design:
Our curriculum is designed to meet the ambitious requirements of the National Curriculum. Curriculum 22 – a broad and balanced, knowledge-rich primary curriculum – helps us deliver much of the content through exciting projects that build on prior learning and enable key concepts to be rigorously reinforced. These subject-specific projects cover art and design, design and technology, geography, history and science. Maths is delivered through projects from the White Rose Maths scheme, and English is supported by a range of texts that have been chosen by staff to ensure exposure to a wide range of authors and genres and encourage high quality outcomes. Other subjects (RE, computing, French, PSHE, PE and music) are taught discretely.
Our curriculum has been constructed to provide children with a number of opportunities to review learning so that key knowledge is retained in the children’s long term memory. Each taught unit forms a building block that is continually reinforced and strengthened during the child’s time with us. Our teaching & learning policy is based strongly around Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction which places a significant emphasis on regular revisiting of key content.
We have high aspirations for all of our learners no matter what barriers to learning they may have and support children to reach their full potential.
Information on the what we use to deliver our curriculum can be found below: