St Paschal Baylon Catholic Primary School

St Paschal Baylon Catholic Primary School is a successful Catholic school where everyone work very hard to encourage and enable the children to reach beyond their potential.

We focus on the children, always seeking opportunities to develop their unique talents and giving them a range of unique experiences. It is a happy, safe school where children’s behaviour is exemplary and we live by our mission statement “Following in the footsteps of Christ”.

The school is oversubscribed, offers a high standard of education for a wide range of children of all abilities both within the school day and outside school hours. We are an inclusive school and all our children are nurtured and treasured as they develop into citizens of the future.

We are proud of our sporting tradition, our international status, our Business Enterprise achievements and our Health and Well-Being Awards.

Christ is at the centre of all that we teach at St Paschal Baylon. We inspire our children to follow in his footsteps through a number of ways: loving, caring, respecting, achieving, forgiving, learning and inspiring.

To ensure that all children experience a happy, healthy and safe environment. To inspire all children throughout the school to develop a love of learning and a desire to achieve their best. To respect and value every individual in our school and to foster good relationships with the community. To teach the children about the importance of forgiveness and reconciliation. To encourage mutual respect between children, teachers, staff, parents and everyone else involved in our school. To ensure that all children feel valued and included so that they can grow in confidence and reach their full potential. To promote a positive atmosphere and to encourage excellent behaviour throughout the school. To present the Gospel Values and attitudes which are lived out in our daily lives and to expect pupils to respect and value people of different backgrounds, cultures and faiths. To prepare the children in our care to become independent, caring and responsible members of society. To encourage the children to develop their understanding of and relationship with God while at the same time, respecting that others choose to express their faith in other way.

We believe that all children should have access to a broad and balanced curriculum that allows them to develop and achieve through a rich range of experiences. As a teaching team, we have developed a topic based curriculum that provides children with stimulating lessons based around themes that engage their interest and have relevance to their daily lives. We are committed to providing children with a rich range of practical experiences to enhance their learning and to deepening and broadening children’s knowledge and understanding through topic days and weeks. We listen to the voices of our children about what they are interested in and what they would like to find out about and adapt our curriculum to follow their natural curiosity. We strive to ensure that all of our children engage with learning, achieve their potential and leave our school at the end of Year 6 ready and enthusiastic for the next stage of their learning journey.

From Reception to the end of Year 1, children are taught a daily phonics session predominantly using the Read, Write, Inc. scheme. They are taught in differentiated groups matched to their ability.

Children are assessed termly to ensure that they are correctly placed in differentiated groups and to check that progress has been made.

At the end of Year 1, all children take a statutory Phonics Screening Check to assess whether children have met the national standard for phonics.

Those children that have passed the Phonics Screening Check at the end of Year 1, move on to learn spelling patterns in words following the Liverpool Spelling Toolkit and continue their reading development through taught Guided Reading sessions, using phonics as one of their primary de-coding strategies.

Those children who did not meet the national standard in phonics at the end of Year 1, continue to receive daily phonics lessons following the Read Write Inc scheme in Year 2 and re-take the screening check at the end of Year 2.

From Y3 to Y6 the Read Write Inc Phonics scheme and other strategies are used as part of a reading intervention programme.