Prospectus » Curriculum

At the Helena Romanes School and Sixth Form Centre we seek to provide a broad and balanced curriculum which promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of students and prepares them for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life.


We aim to achieve this by ensuring that all our students follow a curriculum that is:

Broad: students benefit from a broad grounding, which will enable them to deal with the varied and complex nature of school, work, leisure and society.

Balanced: early specialisation might result in missed opportunities later. Students develop along different routes at different times in their school career. They often discover an aptitude or a liking for a subject they did not find compelling before.

Relevant: the content of lessons, the materials used and the tests we run are all directed at meeting the students' needs now and in the future.

Differentiated: students learn in different ways and at different speeds. Even those who excel in much of their schoolwork may have difficulties in one or two subjects. We support all according to need, including those who find learning hard as well as gifted individuals. From Year 8 onwards, in a steadily increasing number of subjects, students are allocated to a set appropriate to their stage of development in that subject.

Progressive: this simply means we do not let a syllabus stand still. There is constant change in what we teach and how we teach. This reflects new knowledge in all subjects from history to physics; new insights about how young people learn and new government initiatives.

Coherent: there is consistency across the curriculum, and opportunities are taken to connect each subject with others. For example, the story of apartheid and its aftermath would appear in History; in the Key Stage 4 course, Ethics, Life and Faith (ELF) and in English through African poetry.