The Curriculum: an overview

The College's curriculum broadly follows and extends the National Curriculum to allow for a proper combination of breadth and specialisation.

The curriculum is supported by a wide range of academic extension and enrichment activities through societies, lectures, theatre trips, museum and gallery visits, debates, poetry readings, conferences and concerts creating a full co-curriculum which recognises that qualifications alone do not produce a broadly educated person.

There are five yeargroups in the College split between Upper and Lower Schools.

During the Shell (Year 9) year, pupils maintain the broadest possible curriculum in order to introduce them to the range of subjects available at Marlborough and options are kept to a minimum.

In the Remove (Year 10) and Hundred (Year 11) pupils will study a core of compulsory subjects to GCSE: English, a modern foreign language, Maths and the three Sciences - Biology, Chemistry and Physics. They will do AS Religious Studies. They will also continue to study Information Technology and Physical Education. 

In the Upper School, from September 2009, pupils have a choice whether to follow the new pattern of A level and other qualifications which was introduced in England and Wales in 2008, or to take the International Baccalaureate Diploma.

In the English and Welsh curriculum, new qualifications such as the Cambridge Board Pre-U and the Extended Project (EP) now sit alongside A levels, which have been revised in every subject except Mathematics.

The IB Diploma is an independent curriculum, recognised by all UK universities, which was launched in 1968 and is now being undertaken by some 80,000 students across 125 countries.