Curriculum Overview

At Plympton St Mary Infants and Old Priory Junior Academy, we aim to provide a broad and well-balanced curriculum that will inspire our pupils and motivate them to learn.

 Our curriculum follows the statutory requirements of the National Curriculum supplemented by opportunities to provide enrichment, inspire curiosity, and support the development of every child’s academic, social, communication and wellbeing needs. We believe that we have a responsibility to educate for the whole child, preparing children for their futures as flourishing members of the community.

As schools in St. Christopher’s Trust, we are committed to building flourishing communities. To ensure that our curriculum meets the needs of our community, our staff body collaborated to design five anchors which take into account the curriculum that we want to offer our children, gaps for pupils in our locality, and our vision for an inclusive, inspiring curriculum.

In addition to providing an exciting curriculum for our children, we place a high value on the core subjects and weave our work in reading, writing and maths, across our teaching. We ensure that children become effective communicators and are confident with numbers.

We use a number of schemes of learning to enable us to deliver the National Curriculum in ways that will achieve our curriculum aims. Our foundation curriculum is based around a Geography or History topic each term with links being made to other foundation subjects where appropriate. Subjects are taught discretely, following our curriculum progressions. Teachers will take advantage of opportunities to explore particular current topics of local, national or global interest where this is appropriate. Whilst most subjects are taught each week, for some subjects, such as Art and DT, we recognise the value of giving children a block of time to produce a final outcome.

We are inclusive schools and value the many opportunities for learning that working with a diverse range of pupils brings. We aim to provide high quality teaching that is differentiated to meet the needs of the majority of pupils. Some of our pupils will require provision that is additional to, or different from, our core offer. Provision for our children with SEND is outlined in our SEN Information Report and Policy.

In both of our schools Collective Worship plays a central role in bringing our community together, and embedding our ethos and  values. Parents have the legal right to withdraw their children from daily acts of worship, but are asked to discuss the matter first with the Headteacher. We hold a weekly Celebration Assembly, including parents, across both schools to recognise achievements throughout the week. Our values are focus on ensuring that children develop as rounded individuals. At Old Priory our values are Respect, Collaboration, Individuality, Resilience, Ambition, Respect and Honesty.  In both schools, our core value is Love, reflecting our overarching ethos ‘Love in all we do’ (based on 1 Corinthians 16:14)

In our ever-changing world, and particularly in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, personal wellbeing and mental health are vitally important. We intend our children to be equipped with the skills, knowledge and understanding they need to ensure positive wellbeing now and in the future. We also teach children how to be members of a diverse community, recognising struggle in others and learning how to be proactive in providing support to one another. Learning goes far beyond just academic success and we believe strongly that children become the most successful learners when they have developed and can apply their own set of values.

This statement was reviewed in November 2022.