Our Intent 

At St Saviour’s, we deliver the content of the national curriculum, with a distinct Christian ethos underpinning everything we do. We believe in celebrating the diversity of our children by building on their starting points of cultural capital and nurturing their individual interests and talents. Our supportive school community equips our children with the tolerance, language and confidence to embrace modern Britain and the wider world, when they leave St Saviour’s.

Our Curriculum is:

• Fully inclusive
• Vocabulary-driven
• Knowledge-rich
• Thought-provoking
• Aspirational and inspirational

Fully Inclusive

We believe that every child has the right to an ambitious and balanced curriculum, and we work hard to break down individual barriers to learning. We challenge each child at their level through rich texts, experiences and activities, and ensure that individual needs are fully supported. All children at St Saviour’s are equal and we are dedicated to helping children reach their true potential no matter their starting point.

Vocabulary-driven

Being such a diverse school, our children speak many different languages and as such, English may not be their mother tongue. We believe that in order for children to succeed well and access the full curriculum, vocabulary is at the heart of everything that we teach. No matter when children join St Saviour’s in their primary years, we aim to inspire a love for reading. We give daily interventions to close gaps in children’s phonics, reading and spoken English, and we place the same importance on subject-specific vocabulary across the curriculum as we do in our English lessons. We want our children to leave St Saviour’s feeling well-equipped with language and conversation skills to be able to communicate confidently.  

Knowledge-rich

Our entire curriculum is driven by knowledge and understanding of the world around us. We aim to have an ever-changing curriculum that grows organically with our children. We want to celebrate and reflect our children’s heritages and therefore who better to learn from but our children themselves? Our carefully sequenced curriculum builds on knowledge and skills year on year, thus equipping our children with the cultural capital they need to succeed in secondary school.

Thought-provoking

We want our children to be reflective, critical thinkers. By helping our children to learn how to learn, we hand over the autonomy of their education and enable their growth mind-set to flourish. We want to nurture their natural curiosity to learn and help to develop their can-do attitude through making mistakes and giving them the tools to learn for themselves.  We provide stem sentence starters to help children practice their questioning and their debate skills, and through an extensive PSHE and RE curriculum, we help children to navigate big emotions and start to regulate their feelings and reactions.  

Aspirational and Inspirational

Through all of the above, we believe we have an aspirational and inspirational curriculum. We have designed it carefully to reflect the heritages and backgrounds of our children and see it as an opportunity to celebrate our diversity. We pride ourselves on delivering a curriculum which provides opportunities for children to build on their cultural capital and inspire them to be anything that they want to be. Through trips, visitors, clubs and enrichment, we aim to build on children’s individual starting points and give them a love for learning and a lust for life. We believe that every child has the right to flourish, in God’s world, in God’s way.

Every child and family who joins our setting will have their own knowledge and experiences that will link to their culture and wider family. This might include: languages, beliefs, traditions, cultural and family heritage and interests.

Cultural capital is the accumulation of knowledge, behaviours and skills that a child can draw upon and which demonstrates their cultural awareness, knowledge and competence. It is one of the key ingredients a pupil will draw upon to be successful in society, their career and the world of work.

Cultural capital gives power. It helps children achieve goals, become successful, and rise up the social ladder without necessarily having wealth or financial capital. Cultural capital is having assets that give children the desire to aspire and achieve social mobility whatever their starting point.

Ofsted define cultural capital as:

As part of making the judgement about the quality of education, inspectors will consider the extent to which schools are equipping pupils with the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life.

Our understanding of ‘knowledge and cultural capital’ is derived from the following wording in the national curriculum: ‘It is the essential knowledge that pupils need to be educated citizens, introducing them to the best that has been thought and said and helping to engender an appreciation of human creativity and achievement.’

At St Saviour's CofE Primary School, our curriculum is designed to instil high aspirations in all of our children and to encourage them to become resilient, life-long learners who embrace challenges and continue to grow and develop their cultural capital. We believe that exposure, not only to culture but also to situations in which the children might not have previous experiences of, is of paramount importance to their ongoing successes.

Gradually widening children’s experiences as they progress through school is an important step in providing rich and engaging learning across the curriculum. We plan carefully for children to have these experiences from EYFS and beyond. These include trips to the local park, shops and visits to places of worship, museums, sports and music venues to name a few. 

Please see below for our individual subject curriculums. Please see Class Pages for individual year group curriculum maps. 

If you would like to find out more about our curriculum, please email us at

admin@st-saviours.lambeth.sch.uk