Intent

At St James we recognise that the children are the heart of everything that we do. Our curriculum strives to give each individual a strong base for them to build on in order to become successful citizens within their community and the wider world.  All children receive an ambitious, broad and balanced curriculum.  

Our curriculum is underpinned by the National Curriculum and our Christian vision which has supported us to develop a knowledge engaged curriculum which represents our culturally diverse community and reflects our location.

At St. James our knowledge engaged curriculum has been designed and sequenced so that learning is revisited to build schemas so that changes can be made to the long term memory.  

Our main curriculum driver is our school value of LOVE:

Let your light shine – this enables the children to be ambitious with their talents and explore how they can shine and flourish not only while they attend school but at all times.

Opportunities for all – our curriculum is an inclusive curriculum where all the children have access to the learning and that they are supported to learn well.  

Value one another – the children are given opportunities across the curriculum to learn about becoming good and respectful members of a community and valuing each journey and faith.

Enriching education – the curriculum promotes a change to children’s long term memory. We aim to engage learners with such a rich variety of experiences that they become successful life-long learners. 

Implementation

Subject leaders are supported to develop subject knowledge and expertise through memberships to different associations and through a programme of professional development time. The senior leadership team have regular meetings with each subject leader to provide effective support and to ensure teachers have a clear understanding of how the curriculum sequence contributes to pupils’ subject knowledge and understanding of key concepts.

Each subject has been sequenced with spaced learning so that the knowledge and vocabulary builds over time. Teachers have been supported with subject specific lesson structure and lesson pedagogy training to enable quality first teaching to impact on the learning journey for all pupils.

Time has been taken to carefully build the curriculum sequence so that the teachers have a deeper understanding of each subject. They know what comes before, what comes next and where their place is within the curriculum journey.  

Impact

At St. James we want our curriculum to directly impact on the life successes of our children by:

• Giving them the best possible start to their educational journey by setting the foundation of knowledge, skills and vocabulary which they can use to further their education.
• Ensuring that each child achieves well from EYFS through to when they leave us in Year 6, making good progress from their starting points.
• Enabling the children to have an understanding and sense of the world in which they live and for them to use this knowledge to become successful citizens.

If you have question about any part of the curriculum, please contact Mrs Matthews at r.matthews@stjamesce.bham.sch.uk or on 0121 523 5861.