Curriculum Intent:
‘Educating the mind without educating the heart, is no education at all.’ - Aristotle

At St Anthony’s, we have developed a curriculum where all children flourish – not only academically but spiritually, morally and socially with the wellbeing of pupils central to our aims. Our curriculum is continuously adapted in light of up-to-date quality research, which ensures that it meets the demands of the constantly changing world in which our children live.

In an age of rapidly increasing ‘screen time’ where children spend more time indoors than ever before, we offer a school and an environment where children are outdoors as much as possible. Because this is so crucial to the mental health and wellbeing of our pupils, we have developed our school grounds to ensure that some of our curriculum can be delivered in outside learning spaces. We have a Forest School, Farm School, many outdoor classroom areas and a local pond across the road, which we have built into our pupils’ learning.
  

At St Anthony’s, Religious Education (God Matters) and the full range of National Curriculum subjects are delivered across every year group to ensure our children experience a broad and balanced curriculum. These include: English, Mathematics, Science, History, Geography, Computing, French (in Key Stage Two), Art and design, Design and Technology, Music, Physical Education and the Outdoor Curriculum. We work on a theme-based curriculum wherever quality links can be made; we launch and celebrate each theme with exciting hooks, theme days, visitors and trips.
    

Safeguarding and online-safety messages, Personal, Social and Health Education, including Relationship and Sex Education and British Values are taught throughout the school, in each year group. 
    
Our curriculum for each subject has been carefully thought through to ensure skills and knowledge are built upon and that progression through each year group is evident. Our curriculum is challenging, fun and multi-faceted to ensure that we meet the needs of all children and develop the talents in all of our children.
   
By the time children leave St Anthony’s in Year 6, they are ready for secondary school. They are resilient, reflective, spiritual learners who enjoy a challenge. They have good mental health and are happy. With excellent literacy and maths skills, as well as a love of learning, our pupils leave St. Anthony’s well-equipped for the challenges of secondary school.
    
In the words of a secondary headteacher receiving St Anthony’s pupils – ‘I know when I get St Anthony’s pupils they are going to be polite, engaging and will perform well across the secondary curriculum. They contribute well to life at secondary school and they are highly thought of among the staff.’
    
Our curriculum intent is to create leaders for the future through a broad, coherent curriculum, with outdoor learning and good mental health growth being of vital importance. Spirituality lies at the heart whilst rigorous academics are key. In addition to growing children's knowledge and skills we strive to shape their personal development and so enable children to become the most awesome version of themselves. 

Our curriculum structure is summarised here. 

Our curriculum is sequenced in knowledge and skills in each curriculum area. This is reviewed often by the subject leader as well as class teachers. Preskills for lessons are carefully thought about to enable children to make great progress in every lesson. 

If you would like any further information on our curriculum, please contact the school office:

Our English and Maths curriculum is academically challenging whilst being appropriate to every child's individual needs. Foundation Stage and Key Stage 1 use the Read, Write Inc programme to build children’s reading and writing skills, which has been hugely successful in our school. We supplement the Read Write Inc reading scheme with the Oxford Tree Reading to ensure children are reading a variety of books. We use decodable books for the children in Year R and move these into Year 1. 

As they progress through the School, children are expected to work with greater independence, applying their knowledge of grammar and genre to their writing skills.  For each year group, we have identified Ten Key Texts, in line with the Reading Framework and, where appropriate, these texts link to our half-termly themes so children's writing is purposeful and linked to the wider curriculum.

We use the Maths No Problem scheme of work for our maths sessions - this is a mastery approach which has been very successful at St Anthony's.  Children are supported with teaching approaches that focus on concrete and pictorial methods before moving to abstract problem solving.  To support children with developing fluency in arithmetic, we also use Number Sense in Fondation and Key Stage 1.