ST MARY'S CATHOLIC PRIMARY SCHOOL
Being a computer scientist 
Our Mission Statement
Celebrating Excellence through our Faith and Learning
Rationale for teaching Computing at St Mary's
At St Mary’s, we aim to enable our pupils to be healthy, ecologically aware, global citizens of the future. Technology is changing the lives of everyone. Through teaching computing, we equip our children to participate in a rapidly changing world where work and leisure activities are increasingly transformed by technology. We believe that computing is a fundamental part of our children’s education to ensure they are prepared for the digital world in which we live.
Through our computing curriculum at St Mary’s Catholic Primary School, we aim to give our pupils the life-skills that will enable them to embrace and utilise new technology in a socially responsible and safe way in order to flourish. We want our pupils to be prepared to operate in the 21st century workplace and we want them to know the career opportunities that will be open to them from study computing. We want children to become autonomous, independent users of computing technologies, gaining confidence and enjoyment from their activities. We want the use of technology to support learning across the entire curriculum and to ensure that our computing curriculum is accessible to every child.
Not only do we want them to be digitally literate and competent end-users of technology, but through our computer science lessons, we want them to develop creativity and resilience, problem-solving and critical thinking skills. We want our pupils to have a breadth of experience to develop their understanding of themselves as individuals within their community but also as members of a wider global community and as responsible digital citizens.
How we teach Computing at St Mary's
At St Mary’s, we follow the Teach Computing curriculum which has been devised by experts from the National Centre for Computing Education in conjunction with the DfE. Children in EYFS follow a series of lessons supplied by Barefoot Computing, which are aligned to the Early Learning Goals and aim to establish computational thinking as well as support learning in Mathematics, Literacy, Communication & Language and Understanding the World.
Within the Teach Computing Curriculum, every year group learns through units within the same four themes, which combine the ten strands of the National Centre for Computing Education’s taxonomy. This allows us to use the 'spiral curriculum approach' to progress skills and concepts from one year group to the next. This means that each of the themes is revisited regularly (at least once in each year group) and pupils revisit each theme through a new unit that consolidates and builds on prior learning within that theme.
The four themes are: Computing Systems & Networks, Programming, Data & Information and Creating Media. These four themes incorporate aspects of safety and security, learning about the impact of technology and effective use of tools, as well as design & development and creating algorithms.
This year, we have made significant improvements to our computing resources and we continue to make strides in this direction. It is our expectation that St Mary's pupils will have access to high quality technology resources which allow our pupils to explore, create, innovate, deepen their understanding of key concepts and secure key knowledge.
Our Computing Curriculum Roadmap shows the journey our pupils will take on their learning of Computing through St Mary's from Reception to Year 6. The sequence of lessons presented in the Roadmap may be subject to alteration to accommodate availabilty of new resources and will be under review towards the end of the year in order to establish meaningful cross-curricular links with our new Enquiry Curriculum for foundation subjects. Click the image to view the pdf.
Please follow the link below to our planning document which will offer more detailed information about the topics covered, their order and sequence, and the software and hardware your children will have experience of using.
St Mary's Computing Curriculum Long Term Plan
This term's Knowledge Organisers
| Year 1 | Year 4 Repetition in Shapes |
| Year 2 | Year 5 Flatfile Databases |
| Year 3 Sequencing Sounds | Year 6 Selection in Quizzes |
How we assess computing at St Mary's
Assessing computing is an integral part of teaching and learning and key to good practice. We continually assess children's progress by making informal judgments as we observe the children during lessons. We assess their completed activites against assessment criteria provided by Teach Computing. Once the children complete a unit of work, we make a summary judgment of the work for each pupil as to whether they have yet to obtain, obtained or exceeded the expectations of the unit. For some of the KS2 Teach Computing units, there are summative assessments to assess children’s declarative and procedural knowledge and these can be used to help the teacher make their judgements. Children are encouraged to make their own evaluation of their progress towards the lesson objectives and to plan for how they can improve in the next lesson.
In addition, the Computing Leader monitors the teaching of computing and the children's enjoyment and satisfaction with the learning opportunities within our curriculum using:
- scrutiny of work
- pupil conferencing
- learning walks
How can I help my child at home be a... Computer Scientist?
There are many free coding websites useful for children to learn text or block coding. Follow these links to explore.
Online Safety
The St Mary’s e-Safety Curriculum is built upon:
· E-Safety: Education for a Connected World and Project Evolve from the UK Council for Internet Safety
· Computing: The ‘Teach Computing’ Curriculum from the National Centre for Computing Education (NCCE)
· RSE & PSHCE: TenTen ‘Live Life to the Full’ RSE, Module 2, Unit 3 ‘Life Online’ and KS2 Module 1 Unit 3 ‘Emotional Well-Being’
The Project Evolve toolkit of resources and lesson plans is based on the UK Council for Internet Safety's framework 'Education for a Connected World'. This framework covers knowledge, skills, beahviours and attitudes across 8 strands of our online lives from Early Years right through to eighteen.
The NSPCC have provided an online workshop for parents who are concerned about protecting their child's safety online. You can find more details and advice, and a link to the workshop here.
Computing experiences at St Mary's