Key Stage 3

Key Stage Three Curriculum

At Brownedge St Mary’s, our pupils in Key Stage Three experience a broad and balanced curriculum allowing them to extend their knowledge and understanding, as well as skills, in a range of academic, artistic, creative and sporting subjects and activities. Through offering a diverse subject offer, pupils make substantial and sustained progress where they are engaged, challenged and inspired to learn as they move through their school life.

To ensure a smooth transition between Key Stages 3 and 4, and to support our children in their academic pathways, we have developed a bespoke Pathways process. Pupils choose ONE of their GCSE option choices in Year 8 and a further TWO options choices in Year 9. As a result of their choice in Year 8, pupils study a Key Stage three curriculum across all subjects in Year 9 with one GCSE subject. This ensures that pupils continue to experience a broad and rich curriculum across a variety of subjects whilst allowing them to build a strong foundation and experience to make more informed choices in the future. The decision to follow this hybrid model occurred as a result of a consultation process to move the time our pupils enter their GCSE years from Year 8 to Year 9 and extend their Key Stage 3 curriculum. In order to ensure parity between options chosen, all option choices will have the same numbers of hours allocated to them over their study.

Learning for Life (including Citizenship & RSHE) - Each year group has 20 hours a year