Curriculum

Students at Clifton Hill join us as children and when they leave, they are young adults and we need to ensure that we have empowered them to become happy, healthy, ambitions adults who are ready to embrace and enjoy the rest of their lives.

For this reason, our curricula are built around three guiding intentions:

Keeping their world wide – we know something is going wrong when we see our students’ worlds become smaller.  The places they can visit may become more and more limited because of the barriers they face in accessing their communities.  They may become more socially isolated due to anxiety or access challenges. 

Our curricula, personalised strategies and the opportunities we offer must support our students and their families to keep their worlds wide.

Living a purpose driven life – after leaving school our students deserve to have a future where they have a reason to get up every morning, that when they wake they have purpose because they have a place to go where they belong, have work/activities that engage, challenge and fulfil them.  Our curricula must ensure they are able to enjoy new experiences, learn new skills and apply them at home, in work, at leisure and in their everyday lives. 

What they can be is what they must be – All our curricula must offer broad opportunities for our students to ensure there are continuous learning opportunities in many different subject and developmental areas, and learning avenues that can take them down new and exciting pathways to ensure they can meet their full potential. Therefore, we can capture and promote the areas they excel and enjoy.

The curriculum is a progression model that has five bands of learning.  Students learn key skill across the subjects that are mapped out in the learning bands that matches their learning level.  The allows students to be taught at different bands for different subjects depending on their skill set and support students moving up into different bands as they master new skills.

The banded learning system also ensure that teachers can develop challenging learning opportunities for all students regardless of age and starting point.

Students working within band 4 and 5 follow subject specific learning but this is not broken down into separate stands within the curriculum.

Students working with bands 1-3 follow subject specific learning that is differentiated within each subject into stands for example; Functional skills in English becomes Reading, Writing and Speaking and listening at band levels 1-3.

Additional information on the curriculum can be obtained from the relevant head of department.

Details of the department specific schemes of work for each Key stage can be found below.