St Chad’s Curriculum Drivers

In order to develop a broad and balanced curriculum here at St Chad’s, whilst demonstrating our school vision of ‘Learning to Love, Loving to Learn’, we identified the St Chad’s 5Cs as drivers that underpin the curriculum offer that we provide for our children and these are embedded within the subjects that we teach.

Community

With St Chad’s Patchway CofE Primary School being situated within an urban area between Patchway and Bradley Stoke, it is really important for our children to gain a secure understanding of the local community but also the wider Bristol community as well.  Within our Connected Curriculum it is vital for our children to explore and engage with their local geography and history to support themselves in becoming successful members of the local community now and into the future.

Stretching out further, we want our children to embrace the diverse world community that we are a part of and to understand some of the past and present global issues that have taken place.  Gaining knowledge and an understanding of different religions, cultures and languages, is vitally important for the children of our school and this teaching is explicitly interwoven within curricular units.  Developing children who will in the future become well-rounded global citizens and who can identify and understand the needs for change is an important aspect of the Connected Curriculum here at St Chad’s.

Collaboration 

Providing opportunities to collaborate and connect with classroom peers, adults and members of the local community helps our children to build and learn positive interpersonal skills that will support their character development as they progress through the school and transition into the wider world.  Developing opportunities for pupils to articulate their thinking and share their knowledge supports knowledge retention, whilst negating potential misconceptions through peer discussion.

Communication

With evidence-based research demonstrating that a focus on oracy can foster and develop children’s confidence and wellbeing, providing opportunities for children to improve their communication skills with peers is a driver that can be seen throughout lessons across every year group at St Chad’s.  Learning the importance of speaking and listening correctly with each other in the classroom helps them to support one another and collaborate in discussing ideas and solving problems.  The use of sentence stems and discussion guidelines helps to ensure every child in the school has equal opportunities to debate, discuss and reason with others.  As children progress through St Chad’s into Year 6, the focus on oracy enables our children to flourish and it supports them in their transition into secondary school and out into the wider world.

Curiosity

Developing curious and inquisitive learners whilst engaging in our Connected Curriculum is important to drive learning inside and outside of the classroom.  Being provided with opportunities to investigate key questions within lessons and question evidence that has been gathered enables ‘lightbulb’ moments to happen regularly across the Curriculum.

Creativity

Ensuring progress across our broad and balanced curriculum for all the children at St Chad’s requires creativity and an understanding that children learn in different ways.  Providing a range of effective multi-sensory approaches towards learning provides children with more than one way to connect with the learning that is taking place within the sequence of teaching.  Being taught, and completing learning, in a creative manner, whilst using multi-sensory approaches, enables our children to better embed taught knowledge within their memory and revisit this knowledge whilst making links in further lessons.