The St Teresa Catholic Primary School

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Our school and its community are a family that incorporates the home, school, and Parish and we are fortunate to have very supportive parents, Governors, and Priests who work together to give every child a happy and rewarding primary school experience.
All children are taught the National Curriculum core subjects - English, Maths, Science, and ICT. We follow the new ‘Come and See’ scheme for Religious Education. For several years now we have been involved in Barking and Dagenham’s ‘Improving Primary Maths’ initiative. We are also fully involved in the Borough Literacy Project. In addition, History, Geography, Art, Music, Technology, Modern Foreign Languages, and Physical Education are taught.
The Borough has a team of instrumental teachers allocated to schools. Each year there is a range of music lessons and opportunities provided during the school day. The Foundation Stage Curriculum in the Nursery is explained to parents during the Nursery Open Day and at the home visit and the Foundation Stage Curriculum in the Reception Class is explained to parents during the meeting for Reception parents held each July. Each term the teachers provide parents with a ‘Termly Curriculum Letter’ which details the topics and themes for the coming term in each subject area.
All learning is about God and the curriculum is underpinned by that fundamental belief. We aim to provide our pupils with a broad and balanced learning experience while focusing on key learning skills that will help to ensure the children are equipped to become effective, lifelong learners. Our RE program is based upon the core resources recommended by the Diocese and the main aims are to extend each child’s knowledge about Catholicism while encouraging the skills of discussion, debate, and reflection. We recognize that parents are the first and most important teachers of their children, particularly in the handing on of the faith. We also use the Diocesan recommended materials entitled ‘A Journey In Love’ the teaching of Education in Personal Relationships (EPR).
The school aims to stimulate and improve upon the children's confidence and enjoyment in mathematics, whilst encouraging them to develop the language and ability to express ideas fluently and assimilate new mathematical concepts with confidence. Mathematics is an area of the curriculum that children should gain a wide experience of and enjoy throughout their school life and beyond.
The teaching of numeracy, including mental calculation skills, is given high priority, with an emphasis on children applying mathematical procedures to solve number problems. We hope that the children will come into contact with a variety of methods, investigations, and problems covering a wide range of topics, enabling them to acquire the basic skills, concepts, and knowledge necessary for them to develop a keen and interested attitude. Maths is an area of learning that the children use across so many areas of our curriculum, such as science, design and technology, and geography. All classes follow the Collins 'Busy Ants' maths scheme, which teaches all elements of the new national curriculum maths.
We aim to equip each child with the skills necessary to progress through the stages of reading to become competent, confident, independent readers with love and respect for literature. Our reading books are organized into bands of reading difficulty with our main reading scheme being the 'Oxford Reading Tree' and we have a well-stocked and maintained school library. We have strong links with our local library too and encourage children and parents to make use of this valuable resource. We support reading through a very specific approach to guided reading in class (Reciprocal Reading) and we also provide Reading Recovery support in Year 1 for many children. In Year 3 during 2014-2015 we are introducing a focussed reading intervention entitled ‘Project X’ which will support a range of emerging readers but has been shown to have a significantly positive effect on the reading attainment of boys.
The IPC has over 90 different thematic units of learning all child-friendly, modern-day topics appealing to all ages of primary children themes include Time Detectives, Airports, I’m Alive, Inventions and Machines, and Global Swap shop. Each IPC unit incorporates a range of subjects including Science, History, Geography, ICT, Art, and PE, and provides many opportunities to link literacy and numeracy. Each subject then has several learning tasks to help teachers to help children achieve a range of IPC learning goals.
The Pupil Premium (PP) was introduced in April 2011 to support children from low-income families who were eligible for free school meals (FSM), Children in Care, and those from families with parents in the Armed Forces. In 2012-13 the Government extended the eligibility for the Pupil Premium to include pupils who had been receiving free school meals since January 2011 (Ever6 rule). This was extended again in 2015 to include children who are recently adopted. Nationally, the statistics show that pupils in the above groups often do less well than their peers at school. This money aims to try to close the attainment gap between pupils and to try and remove any barriers to learning that pupils may face. At The St Teresa Catholic Primary School, the Pupil Premium has been making a significant difference to our disadvantaged pupils. We ensure that the additional funding reaches the children who need it most and that it makes a significant impact on their education and lives.

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