St Matthew's Catholic Primary School

Welcome to St Matthew’s Catholic Primary School. St Matthew’s is a fantastic school. Everyone at St Matthew’s will expect only the best from our children and we will strive to ensure that only the best is good enough.

We know that children achieve more when parents and school work together. “We believe every child is unique, a competent learner from birth and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured. We are committed to developing positive relationships so our children learn to be strong and independent from a base of loving secure relationships with parents and/or their key person. We aim to provide enabling environments for all our children that play a key role in supporting and extending children’s development and learning. We believe children learn in different ways and at different rates, and that all areas of learning and development are equally important and interconnected.”

At St Matthew's the purpose of Creative Arts is to challenge, create and collaborate. Having achieved Artsmark Gold in 2014, we're reaching even higher this time and aiming for Platinum.

We have been awarded the silver school games award. This recognises our commitment at St. Matthew's to deliver high quality PE lessons as well as offering children the chance to take part in extra curricular activities and inter and intra school competitions.

Mathematics expected at St. Matthew’s, based on the new 2016 Maths Curriculum, the introduction of Singapore Maths. This vision is shared with the parents of our pupils.

In St Matthew’s we believe that every child can master an understanding and love of maths with the right kind of teaching and support. Our mission is to further improve our standard of maths education by providing high quality textbooks, teaching resources and professional development based on the transformational teaching methods developed in Singapore. These methods emphasise the consistent use of visual representation to aid conceptual understanding. For instance, ‘bar models’ are used to represent the relative sizes of quantities and fractional parts.

Students can under perform in mathematics because occasionally they might find it boring or they can't remember all the rules.

The Singapore method of teaching mathematics develops pupils' mathematical ability and confidence without having to resort to memorising procedures to pass tests - making mathematics more engaging and interesting.

School clubs are fun, but they also help boost children's self-esteem and self-confidence. At St Matthew’s we want happy, self-confident children because they are motivated and can achieve more. By offering after-school activities our children get the chance to succeed in a different area, then they can take success and use it to overcome barriers in the subjects they find difficult.

At St. Matthew's we believe that English is at the heart of everything we do. The children live in a world in which communication, reading and writing are all essential parts of every day life, this is why we at St. Matthew's are committed to helping all of the children reach their full potential.

Reading is taught in a variety of ways at St. Matthew's this includes; daily guided reading sessions and activities, 1:1 reading with an adult in school, shared reading as a class, comprehension and phonics lower down the school.

Children are encouraged to read for pleasure throughout the school day and at home. At St. Matthew's we promote reading opportunities through all curriculum subjects.

There is a strong emphasis on phonics in EYFS and KS1 to develop children's early writing ability. From the end of Year 2 upwards the children will begin to learn spelling patterns and rules. Children will take weekly spellings home to learn which are based on phonic sounds or spelling rules that they have been taught. Writing across a range of genres is effectively modelled by class teachers then practised by the children. The children learn how to develop the whole writing process from planning to publishing.

At St. Matthew's we promote lots of cross-curricular writing opportunities to allow children to apply their writing skills across a variety of subjects.

At St. Matthew's our core scheme for reading is Oxford reading Tree. Oxford Reading Tree is a highly structured reading scheme that introduces new words in a controlled way. All children are provided with a reading book and home reading record. We would like to emphasise that teaching a child to read is a partnership between home and school.