Our ambitious and inclusive curriculum is designed to empower our students to become life-long learners and successful global citizens.

The Sociology curriculum at Key Stage 4 is sequenced to enable students to build and consolidate their knowledge, starting with familiar topics, such as families so that they can pin their sociology specific knowledge to an accessible concept and then gradually move on to look at more unfamiliar and complex topics such as Social Stratification or Crime and Deviance. Our curriculum is designed to cultivate a rich vocabulary, enabling our students to think and write like a Sociologist and students are taught disciplinary literacy in an explicit and direct manner.

We enrich our students understanding of Society, through a curriculum that allows students to build their Sociological and Cultural Capital by applying their knowledge to a broad range of real-life applications, such as gender bias in the job selection process or health and education inequalities due to class, age gender and ethnicity. Students develop an understanding of the transferability of sociological skills such as critical thinking, evaluation, analysis and an appreciation and awareness of how CAGE (Class, Age, Gender and Ethnicity) can influence the news, media and life chances. We support students in developing a critical approach to the reporting of social issues in the media and using their transferable skills to question and challenge these ideas. 

Students study a diverse range of Sociologists, such as Heidi Mirza, Akwugo Emejulu and DuBois, celebrating positive role models and diversity within this discipline. The nature of the Sociology curriculum means that we focus on a variety of societal issues such as class, gender and race inequality and we use this as a platform on which to promote not only our Hestonian Values but also the importance of democracy, rule of law, individual liberty, tolerance and mutual respect.

To raise aspirations and allow our students to make informed decisions about their future, we provide subject specific careers education. Students learn how the knowledge and skills they are developing in their Sociology lessons can be applied to careers in Law, Journalism, Politics, Probation, the Social Sciences or Social Work.  

Our Curriculum Maps outline our curriculum design and the development of knowledge and skills from Years 10-11. The curriculum is adapted to support and challenge students with different starting points, whilst remaining ambitious for all.