Our bespoke Future Skills Curriculum teaches content and subject-specific skills for each subject whilst also explicitly developing skills, attributes and characteristics to ensure that every boy continually practises these skills and competencies, and reflects on our school values.  We believe that this enables boys to achieve success not only in the Prep School but also as they move up to the Upper School as well as throughout life in general.

Our Future Skills curriculum is supported by a framework that ensures a consistency of provision across all areas of school life: in and out of the classroom, in academic subjects and in co-curricular activities too.

We want our Bedford Prep School boys to learn not just new skills and knowledge, but more importantly to learn and reflect on how they have best learnt, and why processes or strategies have or haven’t worked for them. This is called metacognition, and there is a huge body of published evidence which agrees that teaching children about learning strategies (metacognitive strategies) is one of the most effective ways for progress to be made.

Our Values

Bedford School’s five values are Endeavour, Responsibility, Integrity, Curiosity and Kindness, and these values span every year group as well as the whole school. Our Future Skills framework adds six examples (or sub-categories) of ways in which boys can demonstrate each value. 

View the full Future Skills Framework

Our Superheroes

To bring the curriculum to life for the boys, we have also developed our own superheroes, who embody our values, and whom our boys love and align themselves to.

 

 

Ethos Behind Our Future Skills Curriculum

In order to help explain the ethos and thinking behind the Future Skills Curriculum, we would like to share with you the following three thoughts on what real education is.

The first is by the priest, author and three times winner of the Nobel prize for literature.

“The aim of education is the knowledge, not of facts, but of values.” 

William Inge
The second is from civil rights legend, Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.”

Martin Luther King Jr
And finally, Swiss psychologist, Piaget, known for his work on child development.

“The goal of education is not to increase the amount of knowledge but to create the possibilities for a child to invent and discover, to create people who are capable of doing new things.”

Piaget

These visionaries were right last century and they are still right now. If we are to prepare our children for their future, our imperative is to help them to be in the words of Piaget, “people who are capable of doing new things.”