St Vincent's Catholic Primary School

“How good and pleasant it is when God’s people live together in unity!”
Psalm 133.1

ICT

ICT Curriculum Intent

Our intention is that all young Vincentians will experience success as an information and communication technologist by developing skills within the three strands of the ICT Curriculum (Information Technology, Computer Science and Digital Literacy).

It is essential that children understand how to use software purposefully so that they can create, organise, store, manipulate and retrieve their digital content. Once they understand the purpose and tools available on each software or platform, they will be able to then combine a variety of methods to design and create a range of programs. Children will leave KS2 being able to accomplish given goals by analysing, evaluating and presenting their data and information.

By understanding the use and intention of the software and computer programs children will then be able to test, debug and edit their own programs to achieve a particular goal. This involves problem solving, planning, and logical reasoning and creativity to deconstruct programs. Pupils must understand certain vocabulary like ‘input’ and ‘output’ options to evaluate their effectiveness of the algorithms.

sv-curriculum-computing

Lastly, the digital literacy strand of the curriculum is highly essential to engaging fully with the other strands. While it is important to understand how and why a program will work, children must use each one safely and sensibly. Demonstrating web-savvy awareness and how pupils can communicate and collaborate with one another online is essential. They must understand and recognise acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and they will learn to report concerns before moving onto Key Stage 3.

With practise, CPD training and proper modelling the children will be able to harness their computer skills and apply them to the wider community. The children will be using a range of senses such as auditory, visual, and kinesthetic skills to develop their computational approach.

Computing National Curriculum Objectives

Click link above to download a copy of the Department of Education's Computing national curriculum objectives.

Curriculum Intent

At St Vincent’s it is our INTENT is to enable ALL children to thrive through the opportunities we provide them with, in order to:

Curriculum Context

St Vincent’s is a 1.5 form entry school with 285 children ranging from 4 -11. Children come predominantly from the parishes of Sacred Heart in Mill Hill and St Anthony’s in Edgware.

Children come from a diverse range of socio-economic backgrounds, speak 17 different languages and hail from 26 different ethnic groups. The curriculum we present, and promote, to the children is an endeavour to reflect these differences by providing opportunities to explore the different countries, languages and customs our children are part of through the projects they investigate. We have looked closely at the context of our school, the backgrounds of the children and how life is for a child growing up in North London today. We have used the underlying principles of our Catholic Faith and the example of our namesake St Vincent to create a set of values which lie at the heart of our curriculum.

We are aware of the changing nature of society and the pressures faced by young children as they enter the next stage of their education. The rise in Mental Health related issues has been widely documented across the media. Therefore, issues such as internet safety and the enormous impact across society of social media are at the forefront of our minds when planning our curriculum. With the current worldwide concerns relating to Covid 19, racial justice, equality and diversity, as well as gender and economic background, we feel it is our duty to prepare the children through a concerted focus on building independence, resilience and communication skills linked to our Vincentian Values.