Hayesfield is a comprehensive girls’ school in Bath, welcoming students from diverse primary school backgrounds. Our curriculum is designed to enable every girl to reach her full potential and build her character by quickly identifying and supporting individual learning needs.
While many students join us with high prior attainment, we also cater to those who need more support. We aim to go beyond the National Curriculum in Key Stage 3 and offer a wide range of academic and vocational qualifications in Key Stage 4, which we believe are crucial for educational success.
Our Curriculum Intent
Our curriculum strongly emphasizes knowledge acquisition to develop students’: communication, listening, deeper understanding, and vocabulary. With literacy at our core, we foster a love of reading, building empathy for diverse backgrounds.
Our aim is for students to become well-rounded, happy, and healthy members of society. Therefore, our wider curriculum includes careers education and SMSC development, broadening their understanding of the diverse world beyond our predominantly white British school in Bath. Our PSHCE program fully complies with RSE and health education guidance, ensuring online safety and addressing issues like harmful sexualised behavior, prejudice, and peer abuse.
Our Curriculum Implementation
At Hayesfield, our curriculum ensures students progress by building on prior learning in each key stage, preparing them for the future. Teachers carefully sequence learning based on national curriculum, Ofsted research, and professional guidance, planning collaboratively across the Trust for logical topic progression. This allows students to build secure knowledge foundations for enhanced learning and retention.
We use various reinforcement techniques to aid recall and ensure all students achieve learning goals. Assessment involves low-stakes quizzes to check learning and retention, and formal assessments to evaluate knowledge application. At GCSE, we focus on deep learning and recall to prepare students for exams, rather than teaching to the test.
The curriculum is delivered via a two-week, 50-period timetable across three key stages: Key Stage 3 (Year 7-9), Key Stage 4 (Year 10-11) and Key Stage 5 (Year 12-13).
“The school’s motto of ‘achieving ambitions’ is evident throughout the curriculum and through the wider experiences of the pupils.’“
Ofsted (2022)
Year 7 Masterclasses
Masterclass is a distinctive curriculum offer that complements the values of Hayesfield and are coordinated to ensure breadth and challenge. Year 7 students at Hayesfield are given the opportunity to master a new skill, take up a challenge and develop confidence in something new. Students rotate through a series of short projects designed by teachers to show them where the curriculum could lead them.
Topics change with which staff are teaching them each year and have included the following:
- The Geography of Food- To understand where different foods come from and how to be sustainable with it
- The Story of Book to Stage- To understand how books, stories and legends can be turned into a stage show
- Harmony Choir- To understand how to sing as part of a choir, including 2 part harmonies. To develop performing skills.
- Talkstory – Exploring Oral Storytelling To understand the early function of oral storytelling and how it shaped modern literature. To understand how to tell a story by word of mouth
- Race Across the World- To understand how travel can help us learn about different cultures, places and people around the world and to explore this creatively through planning, design and presentation.
- The History of Witchcraf-t To understand how beliefs and attitudes towards witchcraft have evolved from the Stuart era to today, and understand the social and psychological factors behind these changes.
- How AI learns from data and the ethical questions it raises- To understand what AI is, how it can learn from data and the ethical questions that arise as it develops.
