Our Curriculum
St Peter’s Mission Statement:
At St. Peter’s, our mission is to achieve outstanding academic progress, especially with reading, and to grow pupils who are happy, spiritual, respectful and self-motivated.
In every subject, we plan for children to encounter opportunities to develop their relationship with ourselves, others, the world and God & beyond
The Early Years Foundation Stage
In the Early Years at St. Peter’s, our curriculum is designed to develop core skills in language, communication, and early literacy, creating a strong foundation for future learning.
In Nursery, we focus on Personal, Social, and Emotional Development, Communication and Language, and Physical Development, preparing children with the skills they need for Reception. Reading and language development are central to our curriculum, ensuring that each child builds confidence in speaking, listening, and early reading.
We value parents as essential partners and host regular events throughout the year to support learning, share progress, and celebrate achievements.
Key Stage 1:
Our Key Stage One curriculum is centred on teaching foundational knowledge in communication, reading, writing, number and calculation, ensuring students gain the knowledge necessary for further learning. Grounded in our mission, our RE syllabus and wider curriculum emphasise our core value of respect. At St Peter’s, the curriculum grows out of the EYFS, continuing to develop physical, emotional, social and spiritual awareness and skills to establish good learning habits in all children. Our children develop general knowledge that enables them to understand and engage with the world around them.
Key Stage 2:
We prioritise core skills in reading, writing, and maths while ensuring our RE, PE, and PSHE curriculum nurtures ‘happy, spiritual, and respectful’ pupils. At Key Stage Two, the curriculum is broad, covering all National Curriculum subjects alongside RE and PSHE/RSE, and rich in high-quality teaching and learning.
Phonics
We believe that ‘reading is at the heart of education’ and all learners can become successful, fluent and expressive readers by the end of Key Stage 1. At St Peter’s, we follow the Read Write Inc. scheme.
The key purpose of phonics and early reading at St Peter’s is to:
- Develop decoding skills
- Improve reading fluency by mastering phonics; read accurately, quickly and smoothly.
- Develop expression by using the correct intonation
Enhance comprehension; strong phonics allow the focus to move to the meaning of the text.
Reading
We believe that ‘reading is at the heart of education’ and that all learners can become successful, fluent and expressive readers. We strive to nurture all children so that they love reading and choose to read to experience the joy, wonder and companionship that books can bring.
The key purpose of Reading at St Peter’s is to:
- develop fluency so that all children can access the whole curriculum
- expose children to a wide variety of high-quality literature
- develop curious readers who think deeply about texts
- build children’s ability to discuss and debate their viewpoints well
- develop skillful readers who read strategically and critically
- develop understanding of key literary concepts.
Writing
We believe that all children should become clear, confident communicators, who can speak and write fluently in order to express their ideas and emotions to others well.
We believe that children should be immersed in language and quality literature. Through their time at St Peters, children gradually build their bank of well-known texts supplemented by picture books, novels, poems and non-fiction books. We believe that this living library of language will equip them with the words they need to express their ideas and emotions to others well and will give them the confidence to think creatively and for themselves.
The key purpose of Writing at St Peter’s is to:
- develop spoken language so that all children can communicate clearly and coherently
- strengthen and extend vocabulary and understanding of the world
- develop storytellers and writers who impact their reader in a purposeful way
- provide a rich, experimental and imaginative curriculum that is rooted in high-quality modelled and shared writing
- develop a secure understanding of phonics, spelling and grammar contextualised within the art of writing
- develop children’s ability to take on feedback in a motivating way.