Curriculum Intent at St Anthony’s Catholic Primary School

At St Anthony’s, our curriculum is grounded in the virtues of living, loving, and learning together within a Catholic ethos. It is guided by three core principles:

• Nurturing Virtuous Individuals: We equip our pupils with the strength and courage to live out their faith actively and become responsible, contributing members of society.
• Inspiring High Achievement: We encourage pupils to set personal goals and aspire to reach their full potential.
• Promoting Collaborative Learning: Our curriculum fosters positive interdependence, individual accountability, equal participation, and meaningful interaction.

Our curriculum intent is to cultivate an inclusive culture of opportunity, where every child can flourish through choice and challenge.

We achieve this by:

• Designing learning experiences that inspire pupils while encouraging reflection and connection to prior knowledge.
• Planning meaningful lesson sequences that build progressively to enhance memory retention and mastery.
• Enabling pupils to acquire the essential knowledge, skills, and understanding needed for success across diverse areas of learning.
• Facilitating classroom dialogue that develops language and communication skills, supporting deeper thinking and reflection.
• Nurturing individual talents and gifts within our community.
• Incorporating world, national, and local events, alongside available resources, to broaden pupils’ understanding of the wider world.
• Promoting holistic well-being, encouraging pupils to be healthy in mind, body, and spirit.

Our aspiration is that when pupils leave St Anthony’s, they do so as proud, virtuous young people empowered to make positive changes in the world, following the example of our patron saint.

Actions speak louder than words.

CURRICULUM IMPLEMENTATION

At St Anthony’s, we place a strong emphasis on teaching each subject in its own right to ensure depth of knowledge, clear progression, and mastery of key concepts. Each subject has a carefully planned Long Term Plan, providing an overview for every year group and broken down into half-term units, ensuring coverage of the National Curriculum and progression across key knowledge, skills, and vocabulary.

While subjects are taught discretely, meaningful and purposeful links are made where they enhance understanding and enrich learning. For example, art projects may be connected to history or geography topics when there is a clear connection, and opportunities are taken to develop literacy, communication, and oracy skills across the curriculum.

Additionally, pupils benefit from whole-school topics and themed weeks that provide cultural exposure and broaden experiences, such as Multicultural Education Week, Proud to be a Brummie Day, and Remembrance Week. These experiences are carefully mapped to complement subject learning without replacing the focus on discrete, subject-specific knowledge.

This approach ensures that pupils develop strong, coherent understanding within each subject while also recognising meaningful connections across their learning.

An overview of each subject can be accessed by clicking on the buttons below:-

Curriculum Enrichment

Our curriculum is extended by a variety of enrichment activities including day visits, cultural experiences and themed days.  We also offer lunchtime and after school clubs, which are available throughout the school year.  Attendance at the clubs is monitored and pupils consulted to ensure our offer meets needs.

CURRICULUM IMPACT

St Anthony’s uses a range rigorous monitoring throughout the year to gauge the impact of the curriculum design.  The impact is evidenced as follows:

• The children enjoy and are fully engaged in their learning, we believe it is this enjoyment of the curriculum that promotes achievement, confidence and good behaviour. In all lessons engagement is fully maximised.
• The range of learning opportunities provided enables the children to develop their own interests, skills and strengths whilst also providing them with new challenges.  Children feel safe to try new things.
• The design of our curriculum and the approaches used to deliver ensures that the needs of individual and small groups of children can be met within the environment of high quality first teaching, supported by targeted, proven interventions where appropriate. This has a very positive impact on children’s outcomes.
• Rigorous assessment and tracking of children’s performance takes place to inform classroom practice, allowing children to make good progress and close attainment gaps.
• A high proportion of children participate in extra-curricular activities.
• Subject Leaders are aware of the strengths and areas for improvement and use this information to produce purposeful action plans that continue to develop the curriculum offer.