St Vincent's Catholic Primary School

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

Religious Education

RE Curriculum Intent

Our aim is for all children to leave St. Vincent’s knowing and loving Christ. Our faith is at the core of everything we do and our pupils are given the opportunity to experience a life in Christ throughout each day. Our challenging and well planned RE curriculum aims to ensure that all children have access to rich, creative experiences where they develop their knowledge and understanding of our Catholic faith. This not only includes studies of scripture and traditions of the Catholic Church, but also what it means to be Christian and living life with Jesus as your example.

We also strive for all children to be Vincentians – treating others with respect and recognising a brother or sister in need. Our Vincentian Values are the heart of our school; developed by staff and pupils together, they guide our choices and learning by keeping Christ’s message of loving God, our neighbour and ourselves at the centre of all we do. This flows through daily life at St. Vincent’s but is clearly visible through our project based curriculum where the values are the starting blocks for each topic. Our projects are built around our values and each has a focus on recognising the need of others and finding ways to help, because they want to, not because they are told to. Therefore our children are taught, shown and given opportunities to live like St. Vincent across the curriculum.

As a Catholic school, we develop strong links with both our local parishes. We want our children to see church as an extension of our school and vice versa. We recognise that not all of our pupils are practising Catholics, and therefore understand that it is our responsibility to ensure our families are supported in the faith development of their children, and that we are offering engaging, diverse, meaningful prayer and worship every day in school. We hope to provide our children with the ‘tools’ to pray and worship, so that as they grow and develop, they are able to make their own choices about their faith.

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.