At St. Bede’s Primary School, we aim to provide an inspiring creative curriculum, nurturing the development of the whole child and in which every child can achieve.
Our Creative Curriculum at St. Bede’s captures the children’s interest and enthusiasm for learning whist being engaging, relevant and meaningful. We believe it represents the world we live in and provides the experiences, skills and knowledge our children need to function as young people and adults in the 21st Century. However, our distinct curriculum also includes learning opportunities that are designed to support our values and reflect our local communities whilst retaining the flexibility to respond to our children’s changing interests and the developing world around them.
Our unique creative curriculum combines art and design, history, geography, music and design and technology objectives. Each year group has one themw per term and the teachers are responsible for planning work, which covers all the objectives, whilst reflecting the Catholic nature of our school. Topics often focus on familiar themes, such as ‘Roman Britain’ and the ‘Ancient Greeks’ but also include newer, themes such as ‘Everlasting world’, ‘Fairtrade’, ‘World Kitchen’ and ‘Countries and Cultures’. These themes offer opportunities to apply learning from our British Values and SMSC curriculum, promoting liberty, tolerance and mutual respect. The themes are broad and teachers are therefore able to cover aspects of social justice, poverty, climate change and living sustainably through the English text drivers, geography, history and art.
We aim for our children to be inspired by their learning, to develop enquiring minds, a sense of their own identity and respect for other cultures.
At St Bede’s Primary School, themed (off-timetable) days/weeks are held regularly throughout the year. This allows us to either immerse our children in an area of the established curriculum or enrich our children’s education beyond the statutory curriculum. We select these in response to feedback from our parent/carer communities, our children and in response to topic local, national and international events and themes. Themes include: Science Week, Outdoor learning, International day, World book day, European Languages day, Walk to School week.
Our creative curriculum has been carefully designed to ensure that the National Curriculum objectives are covered, and skills are built upon as children move through the school.