Curriculum Intent

As a Catholic school, our curriculum is founded on our mission 'to know, love and serve God'. This mission shapes our unique ethos felt in the warmth and diversity of our school community. We welcome students from a wide range of backgrounds, faiths and starting points and support them to become the best version of themselves.

Central to this mission is our belief in developing students morally and spiritually as well as academically. We hold high ambitions for every student, but we do not measure success by examination results alone. Rather, our curriculum aims to build a community of faith, learning and service: one in which students grow in their understanding of the world, find meaning and purpose in their studies, and come to understand their responsibility to those around them.

Faith

At the heart of our curriculum is a community of faith, grounded in our Gospel values of compassion, integrity, courage, justice and forgiveness. We believe that these values are central to students' understanding of what it means to be a good person and the importance of serving those around them. We therefore aim to instil such values through our actions, our lessons and the opportunities we provide beyond the classroom. From the moment students begin their transition to Our Lady's, they are welcomed into this community of faith. From our Year 7 welcome Mass to our pupil chaplains, our weekly worship in the chapel to mentoring sessions with our school priest, our faith is central to the culture of our school.

At a subject level, Religious Education (RE) is a core subject that every student studies through to GCSE. RE is the subject in which students study the teachings of the Church in depth, consider how faith informs responses to questions of life and death, justice and the existence of God, and learn to construct and evaluate arguments on these questions. In doing so, it gives our Gospel values an intellectual foundation: students learn not only what these values are, but why the Church holds them and how they have been applied. The study of other world religions also forms a key part of our RE curriculum. Given the range of faiths represented in our school community, we regard this as essential in preparing students to understand and learn from beliefs that differ from their own.

Learning

Our community of faith provides the foundation for our students to excel in their learning. We believe that instilling values such as compassion, integrity and courage enables students to find a sense of meaning and purpose which can motivate them in their studies.

Our academic curriculum is guided by the belief that all the pupils in our care deserve to experience excellence. The world is a fascinating place; a rich tapestry of knowledge and skills woven by the developments of previous generations. We therefore believe that all of our students, no matter their background, have a right to access this knowledge. Our curriculum is therefore ambitious for all, providing access to the best that has been thought and said. Where students need additional support to access this curriculum, we provide targeted interventions so that all pupils can reach their full potential. 

For students to benefit from this powerful knowledge, they must be able to remember it and apply it. Our subject curricula are therefore structured around the principles of cognitive science. We believe that valuable skills such as analysis, evaluation and critical thinking are the products of a rich, well-organised body of knowledge that builds on prior learning. Our curricula are therefore explicit about the key knowledge students will develop, how it builds on what came before and, crucially, how it will be retained. We regard these curricula as evolving documents, developing as our subject teams deepen their expertise and the needs of our students change. Above all, this begins with expert teachers leading from the front of the classroom, sharing their passion for their subject in the hope of kindling similar passion in their students.

Service

As pupils develop their understanding of the world, they are in a strong position to understand the importance of serving others. We see this as the cornerstone of developing our students morally as well as academically. Our approach to service is grounded in Catholic Social Teaching. As a result, the opportunities pupils take up are informed by an understanding of principles such as the dignity of the human person, the common good and solidarity with the poor. These opportunities are built into every level of school life. Within school, students can serve their community as pupil chaplains and student leaders, through our Marian house system and charity work completed throughout the year. 

Our enrichment programme further supports this aim by widening students' experience of the world. Through clubs, trips and visits, including our Year 7 residential and international trips to cities such as Paris and Madrid, we encourage students to encounter people, places and ideas beyond their immediate experience, opening horizons that may otherwise remain closed to them. This enriches their understanding of the curriculum, deepens their appreciation of the world around them, and strengthens their sense of connection to the wider community they are called to serve.

Key Stage 3 (Years 7, 8 and 9)

Key Stage 3 lays the foundations of our curriculum. Across Years 7 to 9, students study the full breadth of the national curriculum and beyond, building the knowledge on which all later study depends. Our curricula are precisely sequenced to build on what students learnt in primary school, and we hold regular curriculum discussions with our partner primary schools to ensure this continuity. At the centre of each subject are its threshold concepts: the ideas that, once secured, allow students to make sense of everything that follows. By identifying these concepts and returning to them deliberately, we ensure that students develop deep and lasting understanding rather than a surface familiarity with disconnected facts.

From Year 7, we also begin to build the habits of effective learning. We explicitly teach students the strategies that underpin successful study, such as retrieval practice and spaced revision, so that the approaches they will rely on at Key Stage 4 become familiar and purposeful.

Key Stage 4 (Year 10 and 11)

We understand the power that a strong set of GCSE results can have on our students’ lives, so our Key Stage 4 curriculum challenges students to build on the foundations they have secured. The move from Key Stage 3 is a significant one, and we support students through this transition so that they enter Key Stage 4 with confidence and a clear understanding of what success looks like.

Central to this is our options process, through which every student is individually guided towards a suite of subjects that is challenging and appropriate to their interests and ambitions. This guidance is strengthened by our careers programme, which helps students understand how the subjects they study connect to the pathways and opportunities open to them beyond school, so that their decisions are made with a clear sense of purpose and direction.

Alongside their studies in Key Stage 4, we build students towards mastery of the strategies of effective learning learnt in Key Stage 3. In doing so, we aim to equip every student not only with the results that can transform their prospects, but with the skills and confidence to succeed in whatever they choose to do next.

KS3

All students have the following lessons, for the following number of hours across the two week timetable.

KS4

Students can select three subjects from the following foundation subjects: