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St Luke's School

St Luke's School

Our Curriculum

 St Luke's School Curriculum Vision

 St Luke's school is committed to providing the highest standard of education so that all children are supported to be the best that they can be.  Our curriculum is underpinned by the Jersey Curriculum aims and programmes of study. Our curriculum is broad and balanced, rich and varied. We provide pupils with high-quality education and experiences to ensure they are ready for the next stage in their education and prepared for their lives in modern Jersey.  We are committed to making every day count for our pupils.  

The curriculum is the totality of our pupils’ experiences of education from the Early Years to Year 6. This includes the knowledge they gain in subjects because of high-quality teaching, assessment and feedback on learning. Our curriculum includes the teaching of metacognitive skills and techniques to aid pupils’ independent learning, extra-curricular opportunities, and the development of ‘cultural capital’ and broader employability skills and personal qualities. The curriculum in our schools in underpinned by our values: 

We believe in the transformational power of education. We aim to provide a broad and balanced curriculum that will prepare children for future learning and their adult lives.  We inspire children to be curious, teach them how to investigate, research and learn for themselves, and encourage them to become increasingly independent as they progress towards secondary school and then adulthood. 
We ensure all pupils can access a wide and relevant curriculum.  Here at St Luke's we adapt the curriculum so that it is ambitious for all learners and meets their needs. This means that all young people, including those who are disadvantaged, learners with special educational needs and/or disabilities, those who speak English as an additional language and vulnerable learners can access the curriculum effectively. We offer high quality provision which enables young people to acquire the necessary knowledge, skills attributes and attitudes to lead happy and successful lives.  
We use research from the forefront of educational research to inform and continually improve our curriculum. We ensure our staff use the most effective, research informed teaching strategies to promote pupils’ learning. We apply these principles to, for example, ensure our curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced to enable pupils to build constantly on their prior learning and develop and deepen their understanding. Pupils acquire an increasing array of broader skills such as Oracy, Critical Thinking, Resilience, Working Effectively with Others, Problem Solving and Leadership. 
We  nurture and promote in our pupils a set of core values - Care, Challenge & Achieve. We teach our pupils to have integrity and prepare them to be responsible, respectful and active citizens. We encourage our pupils to contribute positively to society and understand, appreciate and respect diversity. 
Our ambition is that all pupils make outstanding progress, both academically and in their personal development and achieve the best possible outcomes.  We know our curriculum has a positive impact by checking that our pupils know and remember more. The impact of our curriculum is also reflected in our pupils’ outcomes of summative assessments including teacher assessments,  statutory assessments and ensuring pupils gain the personal skills which will enable them to succeed in the wider world.

At St Luke's , our curriculum identifies clearly what will be taught – the important knowledge we want pupils to learn and remember - and how this will be taught – the most appropriate and effective pedagogical approaches. We also assess to check that we ‘got there’. We ensure our curriculum has impact and this means that pupils get better at subjects and achieve well. To ‘get better’ at maths or history means that pupils know and remember more. The test of the effectiveness of our curriculum is how well pupils remember what they have learned. Our curriculum is made up of three main elements:  

Put simply, our teachers plan what they are teaching, how they will best teach it, and how they will check that pupils have learned it. 

In our curriculum planning, we plan how we revisit important knowledge. We use assessment to check and build pupils’ memory. We use different teaching strategies that build memory.  In our classrooms we: 

  • focus on one task at a time; we break learning down (‘chunk’) into parts; we sequence learning carefully.
  • make sure tasks, information and instructions are clear and unambiguous. Teachers reduce the number of simultaneous elements that pupils have to think about. If there are multiple sources of information, this will split pupils’ attention and add to the cognitive load.  
  • provide worked examples (WAGOLL = What A Good One Looks Like) and scaffolding to help pupils understand how to complete tasks.
  • take advantage of auditory and visual channels of pupils’ short-term working memory.
  • build effectively on pupils’ prior knowledge to help pupils construct and remember ever more.
  • always review knowledge in lessons to help pupils transfer knowledge into their long-term memory.
  • rehearse the components of complex composite tasks so that pupils’ recall becomes automatic.
  • revisit previous content to embed what pupils know.  We build practice and repetition of the most important things. Some things are ‘overlearned’.  John Sweller (Cognitive Load Theory) says the more you search for a memory, the easier it becomes to find it and memory gets stronger.
  • remove unnecessary distractions and signal the important information. Staff draw pupils’ attention to it, whether spoken, visual or written.
  • plan to help pupils to connect new knowledge with what they already know. 
  • promote metacognition by encouraging pupils to think about their own thought processes and how easy it was to recall the information. 

Progress 

Pupils make good progress if they know and remember more of the curriculum. We have well-sequenced curriculums for all subjects and phases.  If pupils remember the curriculum, they are making progress. The purpose of quality assurance is to ensure that pupils are making good progress and achieve well in all subjects and year groups. We evaluate: 

Intent: leaders specifically plan what our pupils need to know in total, in each subject and the order to teach it. We evaluate to make sure we identify ambitious end points and goals for our pupils – at the end of units of work, terms, or the year, for different subjects and pupils in all year groups.   

Implementation: how the curriculum content is taught: pedagogy. The curriculum for each subject is designed, over time, to maximise the likelihood that children will remember and connect what they have been taught. We evaluate if the curriculum is planned, sequenced and taught well.  

Impact: how well pupils make progress; we evaluate whether pupils, including those with SEND, MLL or who are disadvantaged, know and remember what they have been taught in different subjects and year groups, because progress is knowing and remembering more.  

We evaluate our curriculum by looking at subject planning, visiting lessons and looking at pupils’ work. We talk to pupils about their learning and what they remember. We discuss with our staff, the teaching approaches they use. We look at information from formative and summative assessments. Formative assessment provides a level of assurance for school leaders. If school leaders are confident their staff are carrying out effective formative assessment, they can be assured that problems will be identified at the individual level and that every child will be appropriately supported to make progress and meet expectations.  

Summative assessment enables school leaders to monitor the performance of pupil cohorts, to identify where interventions may be required and to work with teachers to ensure pupils are supported to achieve sufficient progress and expected attainment. Nationally standardised summative assessments enable school leaders and school governors to benchmark their school’s performance against other schools locally and nationally, and make judgements about the school’s effectiveness. 

Principles of effective teaching:

The principles apply to teaching all subjects and all educational phases:   

Begin a lesson with a short review of previous learning.  This review strengthens previous learning and enables fluent recall.

Reviewing previously learned material as part of our whole class feedback session (see policy below) strengthens connections between pieces of knowledge. It enhances understanding.  Automatic recall frees working memory.  This may include  five to eight-minute review of the previously covered material, including peer marking, asking questions, checking for misconceptions, correcting homework, and others. 

Present new material in small steps with pupil practise after each step. Only present small amounts of new material at any time, and then support pupils at they practise this material. 

There is only so much information pupils can process at one time. If you ask pupils to do too much at the same time, they will have cognitive overload and likely become confused.  We present new information in small, bite-sized chunks to reduce cognitive load.  We proceed only when the first steps are mastered.  

Ask a large number of questions and check of the responses of all pupils. Questions help pupils practise new information and connect new material with their prior learning 

Questioning is a teacher’s most powerful tool. Questions can highlight misconceptions, keep learning flowing and challenge pupils to think more deeply about a subject. They enable pupils to practise retrieval and strengthen memory. Every time a pupil answers a question they retrieve that knowledge and this enables knowledge to be transferred to the long-term memory.  

Provide WAGOLL (What A Good One Looks LIke) models. Providing pupils with models and worked examples helps pupils learn to solve problems faster.  

Provide concrete examples and models when introducing a new concept. This provides cognitive support. Give worked out example, use ‘thinking out loud’, provide explicit demonstrations, explanations and instructions.  

Guide pupil practice in "conference time".  

Pupils need additional time to rephrase, elaborate and summarise new material to store it in their long-term memory. Spend "Conference time" building pupils’ confidence check for errors or misconceptions and teach them how to edit & "Up Level".

Check pupils’ understanding. Checking pupil’s understanding at each point helps pupils learn material with fewer errors 

Constant checking of pupils’ understanding means the teacher knows that pupils are ready to move on to the next step and prevents pupils from making errors, misunderstanding or carrying misconceptions into their future learning. It helps teachers know if key knowledge needs reteaching. 

Provide scaffolds for difficult tasks. Provide pupils with temporary supports and scaffolds to help them when they learn difficult tasks. 

Provide pupils with a framework to support their understanding. Sequencing is key. Scaffolds can then be gradually removed as pupils’ understanding and fluency grows. We use modelling, teachers thinking aloud, using e.g. cue cards, checklists, worked examples and models.  We also anticipate commonly made errors or misconceptions in the scaffold tasks and reduce the chances of pupils making the same mistakes. 

Require and check pupils’ independent practice. Pupils need extensive, successful independent practice for knowledge and skills to become automatic.  "Over Learning"

Independent practice means there are opportunities for pupils to work with little or no assistance. Independent practice should be used after scaffolded, guided practice. That is, when pupils are already competent in a task, they should be expected to practise the task independently to become fluent and retrieve knowledge automatically. Independent practice should cover the same topic covered in guided practice as pupils need to be fully prepared for it.