Curriculum

Central to all our teaching is the desire to see our pupils become life-long, inquisitive learners. While our results are consistently outstanding, we are not in any way a hothouse and, in fact, our aims are quite different – we aim to encourage and grow the sense of wonder and curiosity that children of this age naturally possess and help them develop an ability to question and to think for themselves.

Parents often comment that they are continually surprised by the topics they find themselves discussing with their children while having breakfast or on the way to school: whether it be the ethics of the meat industry, the different types of quarks in subatomic structure or linguistic similarities in foreign languages.

Our teaching programme is loosely based on the National Curriculum but with much more flexibility and room for independent thought and the exploration of contemporary issues. Topics can often be led and adapted by events in the news or the particular interests of a class.

In the early years, English, Maths, Science, History and Geography are all taught by the pupil’s form teacher, allowing pupils to get comfortable in one familiar classroom and making the discussion and dissection of cross-curricular topics and ideas considerably easier. Children then receive specialist teaching outside of their form classrooms in Art, Drama, Music, French, ICT, Religious Studies and Sport. As pupils progress through the school more of their lessons are taught by specialists, such as Latin and Greek, although the same broad range of subjects are available.

"Our teaching programme is loosely based on the National Curriculum but with much more flexibility and room for independent thought and the exploration of contemporary issues."

In addition to the high quality of the content of our academic programme, our teaching methods are diverse and relevant. We ensure that all lessons are supported by relevant contemporary technology, therefore classrooms are stocked with digital projectors and interactive whiteboards and we often use tablets as part of our teaching and learning strategy. However, we also use textbooks, including ones written by members of our staff!