ASPIRE Curriculum
At Ainsdale St John’s, we ensure our children have access to a broad and balanced curriculum.
Subject champions have a clear progression of knowledge and skills from EYFS up to Year 6.
Our shared reading curriculum is built around a carefully sequenced range of high-quality, age appropriate texts using Literacy Counts’ Ready Steady Read Together units of learning. This resource provides dynamic and inclusive lessons that incorporate metacognitive strategies and showcase diverse literature from a range of exceptional authors. It aims to inspire children and their families to develop a lifelong love of reading for pleasure, knowledge and information.
We intend that all pupils from Year 2 to Year 6, regardless of need, ability or background, have the opportunity to meet and where possible exceed the National Curriculum expectations for reading comprehension. Ready Steady Read Together ensures that every pupil has access to high quality texts, enabling them to experience rich literature that develops fluency, vocabulary and deep understanding.
Through explicit teacher modelling of expression, pace, intonation and prosody, children learn how skilled readers bring meaning to a text and how these features support comprehension.
Shared reading also provides regular opportunities for discussion, questioning, drama and exploration of language. These approaches deepen comprehension while strengthening oracy skills. Crucially, our shared reading curriculum ensures that every child, regardless of their decoding ability, can access ambitious texts, engage meaningfully with literature and develop the habit of reading widely and often for both pleasure and learning.
In maths, we use a mastery approach based on White Rose small steps planning. All children move through age appropriate objectives with access to concrete resources to support in understanding abstract approaches. Reasoning and problem-solving activities are given to provide challenge for all.
We encourage all of our children to take part in a broad and balanced curriculum. However, parents have the right to withdraw their children from religious education and/or collective worship.
We teach the British Values of democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, mutual respect, and tolerance of those with different faiths and beliefs. These values are taught in a range of ways including through weekly Picture News sessions, RE and PSHE lessons and the use the No Outsiders planning. The values are also included in our thinking around our ASJ Ambassadors pupil leadership teams and key events in the year such as anti-bullying and parliament week.
Our 'ASJ Way' supports our curriculum vision as we aim to give our children as many opportunities as possible to Aspire to Shine for Jesus.
With God's help we can achieve anything and we aspire to be the best that we can be.
We shine like a beacon of light within our community with an open door so that all feel welcome.
Our special family (school, church and community) follow in the footsteps of Jesus.
To support our 'ASJ Way' we have 3 core Christian values: Courage, Community and Compassion.
Our ASPIRE Curriculum
From our ASJ Way vision, we created our ASPIRE curriculum:
Achieve through resilience and perseverance
Show respect for Christian and British values
Promote high expectations for all
Inspire lifelong readers
Revisit knowledge and skills to embed learning
Encourage a love of learning
To find out more about our curriculum you can contact the school office at [email protected] or email class teachers using [email protected] to ask your child's teacher specifically about their year group's curriculum.
To find out how we will ensure children with a disability can access our curriculum, view our accessibility plan on our SEND Support page.