Curriculum

At Corpus Christi, we aim to nurture, motivate, educate and inspire all children to become lifelong learners and to achieve the best they can. Our broad and balanced curriculum ensures our pupils are able to transfer skills with ease between each subject.

Through our collaborative curriculum, we aim to develop confidence, risk taking, logical thinking and develop our pupils’ enquiring minds. We have created units that would allow our foundation subjects to compliment each other, whilst still retaining the importance of focused subject learning.

We want to offer a creative way to develop children’s knowledge, skills and understanding while motivating them to learn through stimulating, interconnected topics. Our curriculum allows for investigations that engage our pupils’ imaginations, encourage active inquiry and create discussion and debate. Our curriculum involves written work, discussion based work, drama and practical ‘making’ tasks.

Our curriculum planning ensures that each of our curriculum subjects (history, geography, art and design and design and technology) are taught explicitly. Whilst revisiting links with the National Curriculum throughout the year, our overview was created to allow our pupils to know more, remember more and to understand more about the ever-changing world that they live in.  

Each unit spans over a half term, culminating in a final art and design or DT project. Our pupils are expected to apply the knowledge they have learnt throughout the topic. 

Within our History and Geography curriculum there is a focused topic on local history and area that is taught within each year group. We have put a focus on map work and teaching the children explicit map skills. We have ensured that our curriculum is diverse and inclusive, offering a range of perspectives and viewpoints. 

Throughout the year we link our trips to the topic being taught with visits to relevant galleries, museums and archives. 

We teach every subject discretely and have subject specialist teachers for Music, PE and Dance. We also have a school resident artist who runs week long Art projects in every class in the school.

We provide numerous after school clubs, including Little Legs, Italian, Ballet, Street Dance, Gymnastics, Samba Reggae, Football, Cookery and Art as well as further sporting clubs.

Art & Design and Design & Technology

As well as the Art and Design and DT units we teach as part of our Curriculum offer, we also provide the following:

  • Weekly sketching time, allowing regular low-stakes opportunities for our children to draw in their personal sketch books. This offers a non-assessed opportunity to encourage creativity, exploration, and development of drawing skills.
  • We put an emphasis on visual literacy and embed this by using the Superpower of Looking resources. This supports expression and oracy in our children, as well as giving them tools to discern the increasing visual world in which we live.
  • We have whole school Art & Design and DT projects every half term.
  • We enter competitions, and our children’s work has been selected for the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Youth Show three years in a row.
  • We are currently working with Primary Arts, Tate Digital, Art Uk/the Superpower of Looking and the University of Oxford, collaborating on developing new resources, researching the impact of explicitly teaching visual literacy and developing creativity in the curriculum.
  • Being a central London School we regularly take children to visit galleries such as Tate Modern and Tate Britain, National Portrait Gallery, National Gallery and Dulwich Picture Gallery.
  • Our resident Artist Nikki Godfrey provides each year group with a week-long art project each academic year.
  • After school activity clubs including, Art Club, DT Club and Craft Club.
  • We celebrate creativity by putting an emphasis on both process and outcomes in art teaching. As a staff we come together to explore new creative practice during our creativity and wellbeing evenings.
  • We reflect on and share our art at the Summer Art Exhibition which is held at the end of the academic year.

Resident Artist

Nikki Godfrey - Corpus Christi School Resident Artist

We are lucky to have our own school resident artist - Nikki Godfrey. Once a half term Nikki is based in one year group and plans and teaches a whole week of Art. This gives us the chance to sketch, paint and make a big Art and Design project that we can plan, refine and perfect over the course of the week.

  • Year One: Romare Bearden and collage
  • Year Two: Peter Max and the Pop Art Movement
  • Year Three: Nativity triptychs and the Renaissance
  • Year Four: Alice in Wonderland and Surrealism
  • Year Five: Gothic Architecture and Corpus Christi Church
  • Year Six: Self-portraits and Portraiture.

Nikki's Background:

Nikki has a BFA (Fine Art & Fashion design) from Parson's School of Design in New York City. She studied in Paris and at Cass design school. Nikki has worked as fashion designer in New York, Milan and London. She has worked for Tom Ford, Gucci, Selfridges and Paul Smith. Nikki has also taught Art classes to both Primary and Secondary aged children for the past six years.