Curriculum built on Core Knowledge

Memory is the residue of thought

(Daniel Willingham)

At Saint Thomas Aquinas Catholic School we deliver a knowledge-based curriculum where teachers are the experts whose role it is to convey their knowledge and expertise to pupils.  

Our teachers have used thinking from around the country to develop a carefully thought through curriculum which builds upon prior knowledge to provide a broad and balanced education for all our students.

Our knowledge-based curriculum has memory at its core as we believe that learning is a change in long-term memory.  This means that it is not enough for students to simply hear knowledge, they must commit it to memory as it is then when they can use it in their thinking.  We believe that intelligence isn’t fixed and all pupils can learn and memorise more ideas and knowledge and are able to develop greater expertise and thereby become more intelligent than those who do not.  Our curriculum is not a ‘pub quiz curriculum’ of disconnected facts, instead we sequence our curriculum to allow students to construct a complex web of knowledge that is a prerequisite for deep thinking.  Knowledge is like Velcro, the more you have, the more that sticks.