Curriculum Champions

At St Robert Bellarmine we are passionate about ensuring every child fulfills their potential and becomes an all-round exceptional citizen with the skills needed to succeed in life. We design our curriculum to ensure it is fully inclusive of every child and that it addresses each aspect of how a child develops, progresses and grows both academically and emotionally. 

Curriculum Champions is an engaging initiative to give every child the opportunity to champion their own subject within our school and share their views about the curriculum. We want to promote a positive attitude towards learning and knowledge, so that children enjoy coming to school, and acquire a solid basis for lifelong learning and feel that allowing our children to play a key role in events and activities relating to our curriculum support this. 

Each half-term our Curriculum Champion teams meet to share their views, new knowledge and ideas relating to their subject and there is an opportunity each term for some subjects to present to our school in an assembly. We are incredibly proud of how this has not only developed our children's love of learning, but also supports the development of their confidence and well-being while in school. 

Our Curriculum Champions

Our Curriculum 

For our first Curriculum Champions meeting, the children discussed everything they love about our school curriculum with a particular focus on their own subject area. 

Each group came up with a definition for what their subject is, why it is important and why they love to learn about it in our school. 

Following this, some subjects put together an assembly to share what they have been learning in their subjects and to talk about why it is so important to develop our love of learning.

Retrieval Practice 

Retrieval Practice is the process of bringing our long-term memories to mind. When we transfer knowledge from our working memory to our long-term memory, the connection is strengthened in our brain, so that it is less likely to be forgotten in the future. 

Retrieval Practice has consistently been found to be the single most effective way of  making sure learning sticks and in St Robert Bellarmine we ensure this is a feature of all learning across our curriculum. 

Retrieval Practice helps our knowledge stick.

Retrieval practice can take many forms and our Curriculum Champions met to discuss what we do in school and how it helps to remember more. 

The guiding principles are that it should:

1. Involve effort on the part of the learner (the more effort, the greater the resulting strength of connection)
2. Be low stakes (with minimal pressure from adults)
3. Involve instant feedback, so children can identify areas of strength and gaps in their knowledge
4. Rely on memory alone (no referring to books or materials)

Some of the strategies that children shared enjoyment with were 'brain dumps' whiteboard quizzes, 'countdown anagrams' and 'finding the connection activities'. 

Sharing Our Learning 

For our third meeting, we gathered together to share our work in each of our subjects. The Curriculum Champions loved to see what each class was learning in each subject and some of the older children found it to be really helpful in supporting them with remembering some of their key knowledge from other classes. We are looking forward to sharing our learning in Music, Art and PE in our next Curriculum Champion Assembly. 

We joined together to celebrate the end of our Curriculum Champions work for this year. In assembly, we awarded the Year 6 children with certificates and welcomed the Year 1 children as they will be joining our Champions in September. 

We have had a very successful year and are looking forward to being even better next year!