We pride ourselves on providing a broad and balanced curriculum that reflects the National Curriculum, our Christian Values, and the interests of our learners. The below demonstrates how our curriculum is taught across our school. 

Our curriculum is designed to stretch all of our pupils and to enable them to achieve the very best they can - to reach for the stars. It incorporates all the below elements to ensure our pupils are not only secondary school ready, but to ensure they can go on to achieve anything they want to in life.

What is a Knowledge-Rich Curriculum?

A knowledge-rich curriculum at Springhill:

• places powerful knowledge at the heart of the curriculum
• has carefully chosen content
• is organised in a coherent way, ensuring it builds from year to year
• is cumulative, constructing firm foundations from which children can build   conceptual understanding and skills over time
• is an entitlement for every child; regardless of background or ability
• is coherent and ensures that teaching does not jump from topic to topic, but enables children to develop knowledge, foster curiosity and ignite a love of learning.

In many areas, our curriculum goes beyond the national curriculum to ensure our children gain the richest and highest standard of education e.g. we hire in specialist gymnastics teachers to teach gymnastics, all pupils learn to note read in music etc. 

Our curriculum focusses on knowledge and reading skills and this enables our children to reach for the stars in life. 

 

Our curriculum documents can be found below and these give much more information about the learning that takes place. We do sometimes move things around to adapt the learning to our pupils. We have another page called 'Year Group Curriculum' which breaks down the curriculum by year group with year group curriculum maps: 

Click here for the year group curriculum page

We constantly strive to ensure our curriculum matches our pupils' needs. We have achieved many curriculum awards:

    

If you would like further information, please contact our Curriculum Leaders, through the school office: info@springhillcatholic.net

Our half termly curriculum updates to parents can be found here:

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Parents receive a weekly curriculum email from the year group leader. 

 

Phonics:

At Springhill, the teaching of early reading is a priority. Phonics is taught to the children as soon as they start school and continued until children are fluent readers. We believe that reading is a skill that is needed across the whole curriculum which is why phonics is taught systematically and rigorously.

At Springhill, we believe that all of our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach phonics following the ‘Spring into Reading’ programme. This is a systematic and synthetic phonics approach that is taught and planned in a sequential manner, building on the children’s prior knowledge.  We start teaching phonics in Reception, enabling children to build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code and to master phonics in order to read and spell as they move through school. As a result, all of our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. At Springhill, we apply our knowledge of the alphabetic code through shared reading and writing both within the phonics lesson and in other lessons. We also have a strong focus on language development for our children because we know that speaking and listening are crucial skills for reading and writing in all subjects.

At Springhill, phonics is taught using a cycle of revise, teach, practice and apply. This enables the children to retrieve previously taught knowledge and embed learning alongside learning new sounds. Children can then apply previously taught sounds and new sounds to read decodable books.

Phonics is assessed in the first week of the new school term or as soon as a child joins in the middle of a school term using a rigorous assessment system. The children are then assessed at least half termly. From the robust assessments, phonics teaching can be planned accordingly. All staff use assessments as a means to inform teaching and to adjust phonics groupings. The school has milestones so that staff know which sounds should be taught each week and each half term.

We use the below reading schemes: 

Early Reading (FS, Year 1 and Year 2): Big Cat Phonics for Letters and Sounds, Oxford Reading Tree for when they become more fluent readers and know their phonics.  

Year 2 - 6: Oxford University Press Tree Tops