The all-encompassing intent of the curriculum at St. Adrian’s is Catholicity. At St Adrian’s, our aims are:
– to provide a Catholic Christian education based on the life and teaching of Jesus Christ, in which the values of the Gospel underpin all aspects of school life
– to provide an environment in which the dignity of each person as a child of God is recognised and developed; and to promote the full potential of each child through a curriculum which develops spiritual, academic, social and emotional growth
– to provide a curriculum which is enriching and challenging, where children experience the opportunity to learn in a wide range of contexts
Our values and ethos stem from our mission and permeate our curriculum .
Follow the link to our Curriculum Principles Document .
We teach early reading and phonics through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised. View our launch presentation for parents below.
More information for parents about our phonics programme is available on the Little Wandle website. The resources on this page will help you support your child with saying their sounds and writing their letters. There are also some useful videos so you can see how they are taught at school and feel confident about supporting their reading at home. Find our full Reception and Year 1 teaching programme overview here to see what your child will learn and when.
Intent
Phonics (reading and spelling)
At St Adrian’s Catholic Primary School, we believe that all our children can become fluent readers and writers. This is why we teach reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school.
As a result, all our children are able to tackle any unfamiliar words as they read. At St Adrian’s Catholic Primary School, we also model the application of the alphabetic code through phonics in shared reading and writing, both inside and outside of the phonics lesson and across the curriculum. We 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.
Comprehension
At St Adrian’s Catholic Primary School, we value reading as a crucial life skill. By the time children leave us, they read confidently for meaning and regularly enjoy reading for pleasure. Our readers are equipped with the tools to tackle unfamiliar vocabulary. We encourage our children to see themselves as readers for both pleasure and purpose.
Because we believe teaching every child to read is so important, we have a Reading Leader who drives the early reading programme in our school. This person is highly skilled at teaching phonics and reading, and they monitor and support our reading team, so everyone teaches with fidelity to the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised programme.
Implementation
Foundations for phonics in Nursery
We provide a balance of child-led and adult-led experiences for all children that meet the curriculum expectations for ‘Communication and language’ and ‘Literacy’. These include:
sharing high-quality stories and poems
learning a range of nursery rhymes and action rhymes
activities that develop focused listening and attention, including oral blending
attention to high-quality language.
We ensure Nursery children are well prepared to begin learning grapheme-phoneme correspondences (GPCs) and blending in Reception.
Daily phonics lessons in Reception and Year 1
We teach phonics for 30 minutes a day. In Reception, we build from 10-minute lessons, with additional daily oral blending games, to the full-length lesson as quickly as possible. Each Friday, we review the week’s teaching to help children become fluent readers.
Children make a strong start in Reception: teaching begins in Week 2 of the Autumn term.
Children in Reception are taught to read and spell words using Phase 2 and 3 GPCs, and words with adjacent consonants (Phase 4) with fluency and accuracy.
Children in Year 1 review Phase 3 and 4 and are taught to read and spell words using Phase 5 GPCs with fluency and accuracy.
Daily Keep-up lessons ensure every child learns to read
Any child who needs additional practice has daily Keep-up support, taught by a fully trained adult. Keep-up lessons match the structure of class teaching, and use the same procedures, resources and mantras, but in smaller steps with more repetition, so that every child secures their learning.
We timetable daily phonics lessons for any child in Year 2 or 3 who is not fully fluent at reading or has not passed the Phonics screening check. These children urgently need to catch up, so the gap between themselves and their peers does not widen. We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments to identify the gaps in their phonic knowledge and teach to these using the Keep-up resources – at pace.
If any child in Year 3 to 6 has gaps in their phonic knowledge when reading or writing, we plan phonics ‘catch-up’ lessons to address specific reading/writing gaps. These short, sharp lessons last 10 minutes and take place at least three times a week.
Teaching reading: Reading practice sessions three times a week
We teach children to read through reading practice sessions three times a week. These:
are taught by a fully trained adult to small groups of approximately six children
use books matched to the children’s secure phonic knowledge using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessments and book matching grids on pages 11–20 of ‘Application of phonics to reading’
are monitored by the class teacher, who rotates and works with each group on a regular basis.
Each reading practice session has a clear focus, so that the demands of the session do not overload the children’s working memory. The reading practice sessions have been designed to focus on three key reading skills:
decoding
prosody: teaching children to read with understanding and expression
comprehension: teaching children to understand the text.
In Reception these sessions start in Week 4. Children who are not yet decoding have daily additional blending practice in small groups, so that they quickly learn to blend and can begin to read books.
In Year 2 and 3, we continue to teach reading in this way for any children who still need to practise reading with decodable books.
Home reading
The decodable reading practice book is taken home to ensure success is shared with the family. All of our families have access to our eBook library.
Reading for pleasure books also go home for parents to share and read to children.
We use the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised parents’ resources to engage our families and share information about phonics, the benefits of sharing books, how children learn to blend and other aspects of our provision, both online and through workshops.
Additional reading support for vulnerable children
Children in Reception and Year 1 who are receiving additional phonics Keep-up sessions read their reading practice book to an adult daily.
Ensuring consistency and pace of progress
Every teacher in our school has been trained to teach reading, so we have the same expectations of progress. We all use the same language, routines and resources to teach children to read so that we lower children’s cognitive load.
Weekly content grids map each element of new learning to each day, week and term for the duration of the programme.
Lesson templates, Prompt cards and How to videos ensure teachers all have a consistent approach and structure for each lesson.
The Reading Leader and SLT use the Audit and Prompt cards to regularly monitor and observe teaching; they use the summative data to identify children who need additional support and gaps in learning.
Ensuring reading for pleasure
‘Reading for pleasure is the single most important indicator of a child’s success.’ (OECD 2002)
‘The will influences the skill and vice versa.’ (OECD 2010)
We value reading for pleasure highly and work hard as a school to grow our Reading for Pleasure pedagogy.
We read to children every day. We choose these books carefully as we want children to experience a wide range of books, including books that reflect the children at St Adrian’s Catholic Primary School and our local community as well as books that open windows into other worlds and cultures.
Every classroom has an inviting book corner that encourages a love for reading. We curate these books and talk about them to entice children to read a wide range of books.
In Nursery/Reception, children have access to the reading corner every day in their free flow time and the books are continually refreshed.
Children from Nursery/Reception onwards have a home reading record. The parent/carer records comments to share with the adults in school and the adults will write in this on a regular basis to ensure communication between home and school.
As the children progress through the school, they are encouraged to write their own comments and keep a list of the books/authors that they have read.
Each class visits the local library every half term.
The school library is made available for classes to use at protected times. It must be booked via the school booking system. Children across the school have regular opportunities to engage with a wide range of Reading for Pleasure events (book fairs, author visits and workshops, national events etc).
Impact
Assessment
Assessment is used to monitor progress and to identify any child needing additional support as soon as they need it.
every six weeks to assess progress, to identify gaps in learning that need to be addressed, to identify any children needing additional support and to plan the Keep-up support that they need.
by SLT and scrutinised through the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised assessment tracker, to narrow attainment gaps between different groups of children and so that any additional support for teachers can be put into place.
The education for children at St. Adrian’s is based on the ‘Early Years Foundation Stage’ framework. These are government guidelines that set out the curriculum delivered to each child, from birth until the end of the Reception class. The framework is organised into the seven areas of learning. Our first priority is to ensure children are happy, settled and ready to learn.
You can access the Early Years Foundation Stage framework here.
In the stimulating and caring environment at St. Adrian’s, children learn to feel confident and able to learn through enjoyable and challenging play.
Play is a very important part of growing up. From birth to five years old, children grow, develop and learn rapidly. They choose their friends and develop their own preferred ways of learning. This involves finding out the answers to questions, developing the confidence to ‘have a go’ and learning new skills, as well as consolidating and extending what has already been discovered.
When children start school, they have already learnt a lot from parents at home and in pre-school. We want to build on what children already know and can do, continually taking them to the next stage.
Children learn many new skills from being involved in purposeful, structured play, both indoors and outdoors. Whilst in the Foundation Stage, children spend periods of time involved in activities planned by an adult and periods of time doing activities they have chosen themselves.
You can access the Nursery handbook here. You can access the Reception handbook here.
The Learning Environment
The indoor and outdoor ‘classrooms’ are arranged to give children plenty of space to move around, to work individually and in groups, large and small.
Resources are well organised and labelled so that children know where to find what they need and can be independent in their play (and tidying!). This means that adults can spend more time joining in with children’s learning.
Through this supported play, children can explore, develop and use their curiosity and imagination to help them make sense of the world in a secure environment. They learn skills, build up ideas and concepts, think creatively and imaginatively and communicate with others as they investigate and solve problems.
Let’s find out more about the areas of learning
Each of the following learning areas have early learning goals. Individualized learning and care enhances the development of every child to help them work towards the early learning goals and give them the best possible start in life.
Personal, Social and Emotional Development
Children’s personal, social and emotional development is crucial for children to lead healthy and happy lives, and is fundamental to their cognitive development. Nursery and Reception classesprovide a secure environment for children to develop as confident individuals. Opportunities are provided for each child to become a valued member of a group and community sothat confidence and self-esteem are promoted. Children are encouraged to work and play cooperatively and establish effective relationships with other children and adults. They have many opportunities to demonstrate their independence and seek help where needed, developing an understanding of what is right, what is wrong and why. The other six areas of learning are underpinned by secure personal, social and emotional development.
Communication and Language
We provide a stimulating environment in which the children can listen and respond to stories, non-fiction writing, songs, nursery rhymes and poems and take part in role-play with confidence. The children love to discuss the text, retell stories through small world activities and make up stories of their own. The number and quality of the conversations they have with adults and peers throughout the school day in a language rich environment is crucial. By commenting on what children are interested in or doing, and echoing back what they say with new vocabulary added, practitioners help to build children’s language acquisition.
Physical Development
Physical development in the Foundation Stage at St. Adrian’s is about providing opportunities for children to develop and improve their skills of coordination, control, manipulation and movement both indoors and outside. Physical activity is vital in children’s all around development, enabling them to pursue happy, healthy and active lives. Gross (large body muscles) and fine (small muscles in hands and fingers) motor experiences develop incrementally throughout early childhood. The development of a child’s strength, coordination and positional awareness is developed through movement opportunities with both objects and adults. Gross motor skills provide the foundation for developing healthy bodies and social and emotional well being. Fine motor control and precision helps with eye-hand coordination, which is later linked to early literacy and writing.
Literacy
Comprehension
Language comprehension (both reading and writing) develops when adults at St. Adrian’s talk with children about the world around them and the books (stories and non-fiction) they read with them, and enjoy rhymes, poems and songs together.
The children will learn comprehension skills alongside learning to decode the words on the page. This will help them to make sense of what the words say and what the text means. These skills help children become keen and confident readers.
Word Reading
The children will learn about rhyming words, listen for sounds in words, recognise letters and use these to blend words. They will be introduced to letters through the Letters and Sounds programme and develop a love for books from the school reading scheme as well as from the class library. Children learn to enjoy words and language. They love to sing rhymes and share books with others.
Writing
Children are encouraged to make marks and use pictures, symbols, letters and familiar words to communicate meaning. They experience a wide range of writing tools and are encouraged to hold them carefully and form letters correctly.
Children develop good small muscle manipulative skills in their hands and fingers before they can form letters.
Mathematics
Through practical activities the children are encouraged to sort and match objects by colour, size and shape, and to recognise, recreate and devise their own patterns. They experience counting games and activities, number rhymes, songs and stories. They learn to use mathematical understanding to solve practical problems. Our curriculum also includes rich opportunities for children to develop their spatial reasoning skills across all areas of mathematics. We believe that it is very important for the children to develop positive attitudes and interests in mathematics, look for patterns and relationships, and spot connections.
Understanding the World
In this area of learning, children are developing the crucial skills of knowledge and understanding that help them to make sense of their physical world and their community. They are encouraged to solve problems and find out about the world around them through using their five senses of sight, smell, touch, taste and hearing. This forms the foundation for later work in science, design and technology, history, geography, and computing.
Expressive Arts and Design
Creativity is fundamental to successful learning. Being creative enables children to make connections between one area of learning and another and so extend their understanding. We provide a huge range of practical activities that promote creativity through art, music, dance, role-play and imaginative play. The frequency, repetition and depth of children’s experiences are fundamental to their progress in interpreting and appreciating what they hear, respond and observe.
Religious education
In the foundation stage religious education drives the whole curriculum. Through engaging, practical, integrated activities, children can learn more about themselves, other people and the world around them and develop their religious knowledge, skills and understanding. Religious education plays an active contribution to the areas of learning outlined in the curriculum for the foundation phase but has a particular and important contribution to personal and social development, communication and language, literacy, understanding of the world, art and design.
Characteristics of Learning
There are three main characteristics of learning outlined in the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum.
Playing and exploring – children investigate and experience things and “have a go”.
Active learning – children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties and enjoy their achievements.
Creativity and thinking critically – children have and develop their own ideas and make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things.
At St. Adrian’s we focus on learning behaviours and developing the language of ‘how I am learning’. Our learning super heroes help us talk about how we are learning:
For more information on St Adrian’s financial data, and how it compares against other schools, you can find our data on the uk.gov Financial Benchmarking Service
It opens up endless worlds and helps us share and achieve our dreams. English knits everything we do together and gives us our voice. In our learning across the curriculum, we gain the confidence and skills to use our voice effectively: to share our ideas, to stand up for what is right and to achieve our goals and ambitions.
Reading
Learning to read is one of the most important things that we can do.
Reading unlocks new avenues of knowledge, fires our imaginations, enriches our vocabulary and helps us to understand and value the diversity of the world we live in.
There are two skills we need in learning to read: word reading and comprehension.
Skilled word reading involves swiftly recognising the printed words that we know, whilst rapidly working out how to say those words that are less familiar. To do this, we need to understand that the letters on the page are linked to sounds in spoken words. This is why phonics is so important in our early teaching of reading
Good comprehension brings together our knowledge of language and our knowledge of the world. Our teachers use their skills to help us develop comprehension skills through our shared reading, our reading lessons and through discussions of stories, poems and non-fiction.
We teach phonics and early reading through Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised, which is a systematic and synthetic phonics programme. You can find out more about our approach to phonics and early reading here.
In key stage two, we teach reading every day. Our learning is rooted in high quality texts and shares the thematic approach of our learning in English. This supports children to become critical readers and encourages them to make comparisons and connections between the books that we explore each half term.
We think it is important to read widely across fiction and non-fiction. Collins Big Cat Phonics for Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised is our reading scheme in foundation and year one, and Collins’ Big Cat is our core scheme as we explore and extend our reading preferences beyond phonics in year two and throughout key stage two.
Our reading scheme helps us to grow as fluent readers. Everyone has a reading book selected from the reading scheme. Our teachers choose the colour band of the book carefully to match the instructional level of reading. This is the level where we have the ‘right’ amount of challenge for developing and practising new reading strategies.
In tandem with our reading scheme, we choose our own books to read and share from our class and school libraries, from home and beyond. This gives us the chance to explore different story-worlds, topics and authors and to find out what kind of books we really love.
We know that reading for enjoyment is important. We know that there is a strong link between reading for pleasure, how well we do at school and our emotional well-being. The adults in our school read to us daily and this helps to spark our different interests and fuel our love of reading.
By the time we leave St Adrian’s, teachers make sure that we can read fluently and with confidence in any subject.
The teaching sequence for writing
Our teaching in English is rooted in our shared enjoyment of high quality texts.
Across each half-term, our English lessons are based on a wide range of significant and high quality children’s literature. The books we learn from are are chosen to engage, challenge and support us to become confident and informed writers.
We are taught new skills at the start of each year that reflect the expectations of the national curriculum. The cyclical approach of the teaching sequence for writing enables us to practise, secure and master these skills across the year and to build upon the foundational learning of previous year groups.
Children’s progress through the curriculum is summarised in the following documents.
Through shared reading, we are immersed in the world of the author. Through our talk and through shared writing, we learn to imitate the authors we read and to innovate with the ideas we encounter. As we grow in confidence, we use our ever-expanding writer’s tool-kit to invent, create, edit and author our own texts.
Our Strands Tracker tracks the development of our writer’s tool-kit across the key stages.
Intent
During this academic year, from September 2023 through to July 2024, we are reviewing our long-term plan for English to make stronger links with our learning in other areas of the curriculum. We will also be sharing some brilliant books as a whole school. The first of these is Oliver Jeffer’s ‘Here We Are.’
As we make these changes, the texts that we root our learning in may not correspond with those linked below.
Year 1
Click on each year group’s bookshelf to view our curriculum intent for each year group.
Year 2
Year 3
Year 4
Year 5
Year 6
Spelling
It is important to be able to spell quickly and accurately.
We learn to spell by knowing the link between letters and sounds and by understanding how words and spellings are structured.
We start teaching phonics in Nursery/Reception and follow the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised progression, which ensures children build on their growing knowledge of the alphabetic code, mastering phonics to read and spell as they move through school. You can learn more about our approach to phonics teaching here.
Following phase 5, we use ‘No Nonsense Spelling’ which has been written to meet the spelling requirements of the national curriculum for year two through to year six.
Neat and fluent handwriting is an important part of sharing our ideas.
When we first learn to write, we learn to print our letters. Our learning in phonics helps us to learn the correct letter formation for each grapheme and make the link between the mnemonic of our phonics programme and the letter.
Once we have learnt to form each letter correctly, we begin to learn how to join digraphs. This is usually in Year 1.
In Year 2, we begin to learn to join all of our writing. We learn to join our letters using a script developed by Debbie Hepplewhite. This is a style with two main joins: a diagonal join, which starts on the line, and a washing-line (or smile) join.
By the time we reach the end of key stage two, we can write confidently and legibly in joined handwriting when writing at speed
You can find more about our handwriting style here.
Our Grammar Glossary details the grammatical concepts taught in each year group. You will see that new learning for each year is identified and sits alongside learning from previous classes.
French is introduced in Year 3 and studied weekly with a French specialist teacher until the children leave at the end of Year 6.
At St Adrian’s we endeavor to make lessons stimulating and enjoyable and build confidence through lots of praise. We aim to foster an interest in language learning by introducing children to the French language in an inclusive way that is accessible to all pupils.
We aim to develop children’s confidence in speaking in the target language by encouraging them to join in songs, rhymes stories and games, which enable them to practise the language in an enjoyable and non-threatening way.
We strive to help our pupils develop their awareness of cultural similarities and differences. We seek to lay the foundations for future language study by our pupils whilst supporting linguistic understanding of their first language.
We all want our children to benefit from a great resource like the Internet. In this digital age, children are increasingly spending more of their time online with their devices. They will be going online for school work, to keep in touch with friends, to play games and to explore new things.
Being online can be a very positive experience but, as always, we need to be aware of the risks too. That’s why schools and parents need to work together to help educate our children about how to use the Internet responsibly and safely.
If you would like to work with your children at home on how to be online safe – and we strongly urge you to – you might like to look at the following resources that we use to support the online safety elements of our computing curriculum.
In Key Stage 1, we use the Childnet ‘SMART with a Heart’ resources. There are videos and other resources designed to help you have discussions with your children about what some of the issues might be when they are online, and what they can look out for and do to help protect themselves. With Year 1, we use the Smartie the Penguin resources (also available for Year 2) and with Year 2 we use the ‘SMART with a Heart’ videos to guide discussion.
In Key Stage 2, we use the Be Internet Legends resources (created by Google in partnership with Parentzone). The resources provide a good mix of discussion-based and practical activities, reinforced by the excellent Interland games.
Please also look at our Online Safety Resources Guide which signposts the main organisations and websites providing parent and carer advice on matters of online use and safety. New information and articles are added all the time, so keep checking back, or sign up for free newsletters such as those provided by Parentzone .
For families with children in the EYFS, there are many resources to be found through our guide that will help you establish good habits and ground-rules from an early age.
Remember, it is never too early to start thinking about online safety and well-being.
The Science curriculum at St Adrian’s will make provision for:
pupils’ natural curiosity to be encouraged and nourished so as to foster a sense of awe and wonder at the limitless beauty and diversity of the world and beyond;
Stimuli which challenge the pupils to ask questions;
engagement and relevance to the pupils;
opportunities for children to hone the generic skills of collaboration, independence, research, and reflection;
pupils to regularly employ the key scientific skills of making predictions; planning experiments; making observations; taking measurements, presenting data and drawing conclusions based on the results; discussing the limitations of their empirical findings; and conduct experiments with due regard for safety;
the acquisition of the scientific knowledge and skills stipulated in the National Curriculum;
opportunities to refine and build upon existing skills and experiences;
equipping the pupils for secondary school education and setting them on the road for life-long learning;
empowering the pupils to make a positive difference to their community and to society in general.
Relationships Education has become statutory for all primary schools from the summer term of 2021. For all schools, Sex Education as part of the Science curriculum remains the same.
‘The Church repudiates as foreign to the mind of Christ, any discrimination against people or any harassment of them on the basis of their race, colour, condition in life or religion’
Vatican ll Nostra Aetate 1965
‘We believe that each person possesses a basic dignity that comes from God, not from any human quality or accomplishment, not from race or gender, age or economic status’
The Common Good in Education. Catholic Education Service 1997
STATEMENT OF INTENT
St Adrian’s Catholic Primary recognises that certain groups in society have historically been disadvantaged because of unlawful discrimination. This policy will put in place a range of actions to eliminate prejudice, unlawful discrimination and victimisation within the school community and workforce.
We believe that the purpose of education is concerned with the development of the whole person. Each of us is a unique individual and we have diverse cultural, linguistic, religious and racial backgrounds.
When we speak of offering equal opportunities for all, it does not imply that everyone will be treated in exactly the same way: special measures may need to be taken to ensure equality of opportunity for diverse circumstances.
We aim to build a school community which is inclusive and lives out the values of diversity and equality.
We respect and treasure the richness that diversity brings, whilst ensuring that there are no obstacles to opportunity for all.
Policies
The following policies demonstrate our compliance with and commitment to the Equality Act 2010 and the Equality Act 2010 (Specific Duties and Public Authorities) Regulations 2017.
