The Trinity Approach 

Intrinsic

We believe our curriculum should reflect the school’s values of Love, Hope, Courage, Resilience, Aspiration and Respect. Our goal is that these will thread through and be supported through our curriculum. In doing this, our curriculum will enable children to embrace these virtues both in themselves and reflect these in how they interact with their learning, with others and with the wider world. These values reflect the school’s Catholic Christian Character and are a core to all we do.

Our curriculum aims to reflect the children’s place in the world and that they are part of the bigger picture and can make a wider contribution to the world around them (Hope).

Inspirational

We want children’s learning experiences to be based on the world around them, be relevant and inspire them to be inquisitive.

We want our children to want to learn and be excited about learning.

We want them to ask and answer questions and to challenge their own, and the ideas of others. We want our children to be inspired to find the answers to their questions and even question the answers they arrive at.

Through doing this we hope children will learn the importance of resilience to work through challenges and problems and also see the world and opportunities beyond St Mary’s (Aspiration, courage and resilience).

Interdependent 

Children in St Mary’s Primary School learn independently, collaboratively and alongside others. These approaches mean that children have to interact and foster relationships (Love, Courage, Resilience and Respect) and most importantly see the value in sharing ideas to develop new learning and understanding (Aspiration).

We believe the curriculum can’t be put “into boxes”. We see subjects as interdependent and interlinked. For true mastery, children need to have curriculum knowledge that is built on progressively within and across subjects.

Ensuring that this knowledge is revisited and built on will enable children to develop understanding that is transferable to different contexts, subjects and to solve and answer different questions.

We believe that children will be able to achieve this by becoming scientists, artists, historians and mathematicians for example. These are the skills they need to fully understand themselves as subject explorers.

We refer to this linking and interdependence as “States of Being”.  In many cases, subject areas are also inter-related and to fully understand this, children need to have wide curriculum experiences and views. Children also need to have experienced subject contexts in the real world and used these experiences to build on and gain subject knowledge.