The Wider Curriculum

Here at St Mary Magdalene Academy, we pride ourselves on an academically ambitious and knowledge-based wider curriculum that supports the academy view of pupils as global citizens engaged across many disciplines. Our wider curriculum content is designed to be coherent, cumulative and ambitious resulting in a scholarship of each subject and a rich learning experience that will ready each pupil for their secondary education.

Our primary wider curriculum is very much a seven-year programme that begins in Reception and ends in Year 6. In Reception, the disciplines of science, geography and history are taught under the area of learning and development termed ‘Understanding the World’, with other subjects taught more discretely. However once pupils move into KS1, the wider curriculum is all timetabled into the discrete subject areas of: history, geography, science, art, design technology, MFL, P.E, music, computing and PSHE. In each of these subject areas, pupils are taught carefully sequenced lessons, split into themed units of work. We believe that having a theme in which to sequence the essential knowledge and skills of each subject is essential in engaging primary students and helping to inspire a love of each discipline.

To further support this love of learning, we frequently visit many of the national museums and monuments that London has to offer and view this as an important part of inspiring pupils to actively engage with their education. We also value the importance of frequent recall opportunities and effective assessment, and thus have within our wider curriculum carefully planned opportunities to use both in order to maximise learning capacity for our pupils with the aim of facilitating success for all.