At Abbeyfield School we are committed to ensuring that all students irrespective of their starting point with us consistently experience high quality education. Our expert teachers use high quality and centrally developed resources in all lessons to ensure that all our students are experiencing the same high quality curriculum in the range of subjects they study; the effective implementation of the curriculum is monitored, and all learners are tracked in their progress.

Our curriculum is ambitious and challenging for all students and leads to high outcomes for all learners alongside the curriculum offer being broad and balanced across all age groups. 

Our Character values of creativity, honesty, independence, resilience, respect and responsibility run through our curriculum delivery as lived values and taught skills. 

All staff are knowledgeable about the intent and sequencing in their subject’s curriculum and how it suits the needs of all students. We have department collaboration to ensure each curriculum area has clear outcomes and approaches to delivering a strong curriculum. Our curriculum and teaching is built around a mastery model in order that all pupils acquire the core powerful knowledge that they require and learn to apply this to their future aspirations, qualifications and careers. Curriculum knowledge is appropriately sequenced to build on key prior knowledge and work towards good outcomes for all.

At KS3, students are taught in mixed-ability tutor groups for most subjects (excluding DT and PE as well as Maths from Y9). At KS4 students are taught in carefully considered sets for English, Maths and Science and are taught in mixed ability groups for all other subjects.The rationale behind this is that there is a very limited evidence base to support or challenge setting classes by ability or attainment with the evidence suggest that setting by attainment has little to no impact on student progress. In fact, it typically results in worse outcomes for low attaining pupils. Setting of students too early also has a negative impact on wider outcomes such as confidence and student outlooks with studies suggesting setting can have a negative impact of a pupil’s own perspective of their ability and potential as well as negatively impacting teacher expectations with disadvantaged pupils.

More details about the curriculum at Abbeyfield can be found on the left hand side of this page.