St Mary’s is a popular school situated in the heart of London, with all the opportunities and challenges that face people living and working in one of the major capitals of the world. We believe that children thrive in a caring and intellectually stimulating environment with plenty of praise and encouragement. At St Mary’s we aim to help our children to succeed and gain confidence so that they contribute to society as skillful and well-balanced young people, Our school has close links to our local Church of England Church, St Mary with All Souls, Kilburn.
St Mary’s C of E Primary School aims to provide a caring, stable, stimulating environment for learning. Staff is committed to ensuring that the children’s time at school is productive and successful. We aim to raise achievement through all aspects of the curriculum developing self-confidence, motivation, self-reliance, and cooperation.
We are committed to equality of opportunity and serve the local community by welcoming children from all backgrounds and faiths. Whilst our ethos is positively Christian, we value and respect the diversity of our community and aim to set all children on life’s path through compassion, thoughtfulness, and understanding of one another, and respect for one another’s differences. We believe that parents and teachers have a responsibility to ensure that children leave school with:
- good basic skills in English, maths, and ICT
- a love of learning
- good social skills
- a sense of responsibility towards society
- the confidence to stand up for themselves
- the knowledge that they are special in God’s eyes
School governors help the Headteacher to lead the school. The Headteacher is responsible for the day-to-day management and leadership of the school whereas the governors are the strategic arm of the school. The governing body is made up of elected parents, staff including the Headteacher, foundation governors (appointed by the Diocese), and a local authority governor.
English is a core curriculum subject and is taught every day. We use a variety of teaching and learning styles to teach English skills. We aim to develop children’s ability to listen, speak, read and write for a wide range of purposes, including the communication of their ideas, views, and feelings. We do this through daily English lessons in which children experience whole-class reading or writing activities, guided group or children's independent activities, and whole-class sessions to review and assess progress and learning.
Children are taught a range of strategies to help them read, including phonics (the sounds letters make). We use the Letters and Sounds scheme to teach phonics. You can find out more about this scheme if you Google search ‘Letters and Sounds – The Department for Education.’ Discrete phonics lessons are taught daily in Reception, Year 1, Year 2, and Year 3. Children are assessed and then streamed into relevant phases depending on their ability.
Phase 1: Phonics lessons take place daily (this phase is mostly taught in Reception class). Children explore sounds and develop their listening skills.
Phase 2: Phonics lessons take place on 4 days of the week. The Letters and Sounds scheme is used to deliver a progressive program of word reading skills. By the end of phase 2, many children should be able to read some VC (vowel-consonant) and CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words and to spell them. They start to learn to read and spell some high-frequency ‘tricky’ words.
Phase 3 and 4: Phonics lessons take place on 4 days of the week. Letters and Sounds is the scheme used to deliver a progressive program of word reading skills. Children begin to read and write one grapheme for each of the 44 phonemes. They blend and segment CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant), CCVC, and CVCC words for reading and spelling and use their phonic knowledge when trying to read and write more complex words.
Phase 5 and 6: Phonics lessons take place on 4 days of the week. Letters and Sounds are used to deliver a progressive program of word reading skills. Children are taught to read words automatically if they are very familiar with decoding them quickly and silently because their sounding and blending routine is now established and to decode them out loud. Children are taught to read 100 of the most frequently occurring words in English.
