Harris Academy Beulah Hill

All our students take up the opportunity to lead fulfilled lives with direction and purpose. Our teachers lead with professionalism and scholarship. They are experts in their field. All of us are part of a warm family of staff and governors who have the highest ambition and a deep hunger to learn.  

We emphasise the difference between performance and learning, focusing attention on the storing of facilitating knowledge and vocabulary into Long-Term Memory, and the use of this knowledge to develop conceptual understanding. This helps ensure we rapidly close gaps between the disadvantaged and advantaged, whilst enabling all students to flourish. Our curriculum extends beyond the classroom to help our students become disciplined and resilient scholars, and active, kind and grateful citizens, who are proud to serve the communities they belong to.

Our curriculum places building vocabulary and knowledge at its heart, helping all our learners develop both conceptual and disciplinary understanding in each subject, and thereby become the best versions of themselves they can be. Developments in cognitive science have shown that the key to academic success and effective scholarship is working hard to ensure that facilitating knowledge and vocabulary is transferred, through rehearsal and retrieval, into Long-Term Memory, and our curriculum places the acquisition of core knowledge at its heart. It is this permanent store of knowledge that will enable our students to be effective readers, writers, evaluators, and which frees up cognitive space for them to deliberately practice their key subject skills. It is also this store of knowledge that will enable them to be politically literate citizens, able to navigate the diverse and sometimes misleading sources of information of the 21st century.