Our curriculum exists to equip every pupil with the capabilities they need to live a life of meaning, safety, connection, and purpose.
We don’t organise our curriculum around year groups, subjects delivered in isolation, or a fixed body of knowledge to be transmitted and tested. Instead, our curriculum is built around ten human capabilities — drawing on the work of philosopher Martha Nussbaum — that describe what a person needs to be able to do and be in order to flourish: things like communication and thought, emotional understanding, relationships, bodily health and safety, autonomy, and connection to the wider world. These capabilities aren’t an add-on to our curriculum. They are its organising purpose. Every subject we teach is understood as a distinct way of developing them.
We call this our Capabilities-Based Integrated Therapeutic Curriculum. The name reflects two things working as one: education and therapy are not separate services that happen to sit alongside each other here, but a single, jointly planned offer, oriented throughout towards each pupil’s capabilities and their future adult life.
Stage, not age
Pupils at Mountfield Heath are not grouped by chronological age. Each pupil is placed on one of three developmental pathways — Curiosity, Discover, or Explore — based on their stage of development, communication profile, and individual need, as identified through their EHCP, their Individual Therapeutic Education Plan (ITEP), and ongoing holistic assessment.
Curiosity pupils engage through sensory experience, co-regulation with trusted adults, and early cause-and-effect learning.
Discover pupils engage through purposeful, supported participation in real-world activity, routines, and social situations.
Explore pupils engage with increasing independence and agency, building the self-determination they’ll need in adult life.
Pathway placement is reviewed regularly and is never fixed. A pupil’s pathway describes how they currently engage with learning, not a ceiling on what they can achieve.
Experiences, not objectives.
Across every subject — English, Maths, PSHE, Science, Forest School, the Arts, the Humanities, Digital Literacy, and PE — our curriculum is built from real experiences and meaningful exposures rather than a checklist of learning objectives. The same core experiences are often revisited over time; what changes is not the content but the depth, independence, and richness of a pupil’s engagement with it. That progress is captured through Evidence for Learning (EfL) — a narrative, observation-based record of development — and reviewed alongside each pupil’s ITEP targets and EHCP outcomes
One school, shared moments
Alongside pathway-based learning, the whole school comes together around shared termly topics — the same broad theme experienced differently across each pathway, but common to everyone. These shared topics, along with daily lunch and break times, assemblies, and whole-school events, give pupils a consistent experience of belonging to one community, not three separate ones. It’s through these shared moments, as much as through the classroom, that pupils build relationships, affiliation, and a sense of place within Mountfield Heath.
Celebrating achievement with high aspirations
As a neuro-affirming and trauma-informed school, we completely reject deficit-based approaches that focus on what a child can’t do. We assess ipsatively: against each pupil's own starting point and trajectory, not against normative, age-related benchmarks. Progress at Mountfield Heath is rarely linear, and our assessment model is built to reflect that honestly. Because every pupil at Mountfield Heath will move on to the next stage of education, we also think about adulthood from the outset. Our approach to Careers and Preparing for Adulthood, and how our curriculum translates into outcomes over time, is set out in the documents below alongside our most recent Past Performance Statement.
Explore our curriculum in more detail