Curriculum
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The heartbeat of The Perse School is a broad curriculum which stretches the brightest,
includes 'hard' subjects and is focused on preparing students for the future.
Challenge
The Lower School curriculum is broad and stimulating. Pupils are taught by subject specialists, often in specialist classrooms and laboratories, and establish learning habits which will take them to GCSE and beyond.
Some subjects are familiar from primary school. Others seem quite different. Biology, Chemistry and Physics are taught separately throughout the school, and always in purpose-built laboratories; Latin is new for almost everyone. We aim to encourage a love of learning and the confidence to rise to new intellectual challenges.
Perse pupils are trained to think independently and to engage constructively with a diverse and complex world. They may be reflective thinkers in one lesson (there are lessons in Thinking Skills), collaborative team-workers in the next. The Perse is an exciting place of energy and ideas.
Breadth
A broad-based curriculum is essential for balanced intellectual development. The Perse therefore provides a wide core of compulsory subjects to GCSE, including three separate sciences and a modern foreign language. Pupils make guided subject choices in the Third Form, and choose three or four additional subjects to study for GCSE.
Pupils are valued as individuals who progress at different rates, and require increasingly flexible learning opportunities, including early Maths and French GCSE qualifications for many.
"The unexamined life is not worth living." We do not believe that Socrates had GCSEs in mind when he wrote those words, and we are also passionate about our non-examined curriculum! This includes classes for all in Engineering Technology, and the opportunity to learn new languages outside the usual curriculum such as Japanese.
Flexibility
Flexibility and opportunities for specialisation are the watchwords of the Sixth Form curriculum. Most students study four subjects to AS, and three subjects to A2 (five at AS and four at A2 for some of the brightest).
The advantage of A-levels and the new Pre-U qualification is the great freedom that students have to construct their own curriculum - either focused on preparation for specific University courses, or spanning the Arts / Humanities / Sciences divide.
Innovation
The Perse has been a pioneer of international IGCSEs in Mathematics and the Sciences, finding that these courses are in some cases more rigorous and offer a better preparation for further study than conventional GCSEs.
The Cambridge Pre-U is a new development which we are exploring at post-16. Pre-U is an alternative to A-levels, developed by examination boards in conjunction with Universities, and potentially offering more rigorous and innovative courses. Perse teachers have been closely involved in developing several Pre-U specifications. We plan to offer the Pre-U in a small number of subjects in the first instance.