Curriculum & Learning Organisers

St Martin's Curriculum Intent, Implementation and Impact plans can be viewed by clicking on the individual plans. 

INTENT - Learning together achieving together

Our curriculum in its widest sense includes everything that children learn and experience at St Martin’s. It includes the NC range of academic subjects, opportunities to understand and contribute as global citizens and learn how to lead happy and healthy lives, physically and mentally.

Our broad knowledge based curriculum is sequentially planned to challenge and build on prior learning so the children can achieve and be well prepared for the next stage of their education. Teachers ensure key concepts and knowledge are transferred to long term memory and applied across subjects and themes.

As global citizens we develop in our children an appreciation, understanding and tolerance for all faiths, races, beliefs and cultural diversity. We ensure they learn and understand democracy, liberty and the rule of law. Children are taught to be responsible citizens and to play an active role within our school and across a range of communities.

Our Christian and school values ensure that spiritual health and wellbeing of all the children is prioritised. We have an inclusive, trauma informed ethos where children can feel safe and nurtured to have fun, develop socially, build resilience and to grasp the opportunities life has to offer.

We know education is a continuous learning journey for our children, our families, and our staff. We are proud of our achievements but at the same time try hard to be a little bit better each day. We recognise and value feedback as an essential tool to support improvement.

Recovery Curriculum

Disruption to education caused by the Covid pandemic impacted significantly on everyone’s lives and there is a need to support all members of our school community. During school closures, staff supported pupils through daily structured online remote learning and regular communication. Pupils experience of home learning varied enormously and there was a varying degree of impact on skills and knowledge due to missed time at school.

When returning from school closures, through staff CPD, we developed a ‘Recovery Curriculum’ based around the needs of our children using the 5 principles advocated by Professor Barry Carpenter (2020) in ‘A Recovery Curriculum: Loss and Life for our pupils and schools post pandemic.

• Relationships – we ensured that pupils were given the time, space and strategies to re-establish relationships with their peers and staff within school.
• Community – we listened to pupils’ personal experiences and identified and adapted the support provided.
• Curriculum – we listened to our pupils’ home learning experiences, assessed and identified where further support was required. We reorganised the curriculum planning and prioritised some missed content.
• Metacognition – we planned activities that rebuilt confidence, focus and developed independence. We ensured children experienced success when learning.
• Well-being – we gave pupils time to process issues and prioritised wellbeing. We promoted and modelled the ways to wellbeing through connecting, learning, being active, taking notice, giving to others and being creative.

This recovery curriculum included adapting the content and delivery. In 2020-21 Catch-up and tutoring focused primarily on oracy and reading. We also prioritised rebuilding community, improving physical fitness and increasing opportunities for creativity. Teacher assessments were key in identifying gaps and prioritising objectives for teaching and additional support. In response to the children’s needs we enabled more flexibility in the school day and for some individuals and groups, supplemented our PHSE curriculum with additional recovery materials and time.

A Learning Organiser sets out in detail the essential information that children should know and understand by the end of the topic. They can include dates, key personnel, vocabulary, definitions, diagrams and other information.   

We have developed our Learning Organisers to support the delivery of the curriculum and inform our planning. They have been designed to ensure progression and continuity within subjects.  Please click on the links below to download the current Learning Organisers for your child's class.