Curriculum Intent

St Margaret Mary Catholic Primary School is located in Carlisle, in an area which is becoming increasingly diverse. Our area is ranked as an area of high deprivation. Our curriculum seeks to remove the barriers that these circumstances might bring. We offer a broad, balanced and academically rigorous curriculum for all our learners. As a Catholic school, we are inspired by Jesus’ intention for the lives of His people. We encourage each child to grow in knowledge and are committed to helping them reach their full potential in a safe, respectful, and stimulating environment where all are valued and respected. Our curriculum at St Margaret Mary starts with the child and how we as professionals can create a learning environment for them which nurtures their mind, body and soul to develop a happy, healthy and well-rounded citizen of the world. A child who can enjoy life to the full.

Our curriculum has been developed with a clear intent to:

• Provide a broad and balanced programme of study that meets the needs of all of
  our children.
• Enable all of our children to make progress in their learning and achieve their full
  potential.
• Support the acquisition of knowledge and vocabulary; knowledge is at the heart to ensure that children develop a strong vocabulary base and understanding of the world.
• Promote good behaviour and safety of self and others.
• Support children’s spiritual, moral, social and cultural development.
• Enable all children to become increasingly knowledgeable and make sense of complex concepts.
• Promote long-term learning where progress means knowing more and remembering more.
• Deliver a curriculum inspired by current research on how memory works to ensure children are taught in a way in which they can remember the content in the future.
• Deliver a curriculum that builds on big ideas and concepts so that children have the knowledge and skills to look wider than their immediate context and make different, aspirational choices.

Curriculum Implementation

We have adopted Curriculum with Unity Schools Partnership (CUSP) as our central curriculum strategy, alongside Read, Write, Inc for early reading and White Rose and NCETM for maths. CUSP outlines the core content in a spaced and interleaved sequence for History, Geography, Science, Music, French, Computing, Design and Technology and Art. This is made up of a long-term sequence that is supported by evidence-led learning modules and high-quality teaching resources that clearly outline what pupils should know, be able to do and remember at key points in their Primary education.

We also deliver CUSP Reading, CUSP spelling and CUSP Writing as the basis of our English curriculum. It is evidence informed, carefully sequenced English curriculum, which maps core content in Reading and Writing across the primary journey, ensuring that learning is taught and revisited over time so that pupils commit their understanding to the long-term memory. All CUSP subjects have been built around evidence-led practice in the fields of education and cognitive science to ensure coherence and connectivity so that knowledge, skills and concepts are introduced, built on over time, revisited and assessed.

We also deliver CUSP Reading, CUSP spelling and CUSP Writing as the basis of our English curriculum. It is evidence informed, carefully sequenced English curriculum, which maps core content in Reading and Writing across the primary journey, ensuring that learning is taught and revisited over time so that pupils commit their understanding to the long-term memory. All CUSP subjects have been built around evidence-led practice in the fields of education and cognitive science to ensure coherence and connectivity so that knowledge, skills and concepts are introduced, built on over time, revisited and assessed.

It is crucial that our curriculum teaches children how to stay safe and give them the tools to make choices which change their community. This starts in Early Years with an understanding of private parts and appropriate touch using the NSPCC Pantosaurus material building over time to a sophisticated understanding of the dangers of grooming for our older children through TenTen Life to the Full scheme of work. We aim to build resilient, questioning learners, who are prepared to try things and know it’s ok get them wrong.  We recognise the importance of the children attending school every day and teach this to them and their parents explicitly. We focus on self-regulation as a key skill for life and teach that explicitly. Our PHSE and HRE curriculum and Catholic Values underpins all that we do.

Curriculum Impact

The impact of our curriculum is that children leave St Margaret Mary Catholic Primary School having achieved excellent academic standards, but also prepared as fluent, resilient, ambitious, lifelong learners who are faith filled in their beliefs, compassionate towards others near and far, especially the less fortunate, loving in their actions and words and hopeful for the future ready to thrive in the next stage of education.

CUSP Curriculum

CUSP is a partnership, not a product. We are agile; this gives us the capability and systems to respond to the best evidence available that tells us what works in the modern classroom. 

CUSP is unapologetically ambitious and brings the most effective research and evidence-led practice to the attention of school improvement through excellence in curriculum structure, cumulative and coherent resources to support teacher subject knowledge, teacher pedagogy, learning tasks, assessment and feedback.

At the absolute heart of the full CUSP offer is a central belief that all pupils should have the opportunity to develop competence and confidence in reading. The golden thread of vocabulary is explicitly and systematically instructed across the offer; disciplinary literacy is carefully planned and observed; rich and demanding texts sit at the centre of instruction in all subject disciplines. 

Schools join CUSP to bridge the gap between evidence and practice through carefully designed learning sequences, coherent and aspirational resources and outstanding support for the development of teachers’ knowledge and pedagogy. Schools that we work with report rapid and significant impact on outcomes, teacher confidence and overall curriculum coherence. This is particularly evident for pupils with SEND and those pupils experiencing disadvantage. 

CUSP is an evidence-led curriculum that is built on the principles underpinned by the best cognitive and neuroscientific research available. Three core elements constitute the overarching curriculum offer: Cognitive load theory, Principles of Instruction and Generative Learning Practice. Disciplinary research has been distilled alongside this in the context of each individual subject. For example, CUSP Reading draws on the work of Rasinski and Shanahan around prosodic Reading; CUSP Writing draws on the work of Diane McGuiness around pattern seeking; CUSP Art draws on the work of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation around embedding learning through the arts. Unity Research School, one of the Education Endowment Foundation’s 28 national centres of excellence, guides our principles and practice.

Strategically led by Alex Bedford and Lauren Meadows, CUSP content is developed and enriched by subject specialists and leaders in their field. CUSP long-term sequences and Learning modules clearly articulate and define the substantive knowledge (what pupils need to know) as well as the disciplinary knowledge (what pupils can do). We have mapped this coherently and cumulatively across the curriculum. 

CUSP curriculum structure is fundamentally built to support the principles of Cognitive Load Theory, Explicit Vocabulary Instruction, Spaced Retrieval practice and Interleaving. This was not an afterthought or an attempt to squeeze evidence-led practice into an existing curriculum design: it was deliberate and executed with intent.

CUSP is integrally and systematically connected to the pedagogy and professional training we have built around our curriculum. The phenomenal success schools realise is a combination of structure, content, evidence-led pedagogical principles and practice as well as a significant uplift in teacher subject knowledge.

An essential component to CUSP lessons is the systematic and coherent approach that we embed focusing on the six phases of a lesson.

Excellent subject knowledge, connections with prior learning, consistency in explanations with worked examples, deliberate practice with hard thinking tasks, and integration of new learning creates long-term memory and coherent schemata creation.

To see what your child is currently learning, click on the Class Page link below.