What does the KS5 Sociology curriculum aim to do?

  • Challenge all students academically to ensure they fulfill their potential.
  • Encourage students to think about and understand their own social context.  
  • Develop critical thinking skills by exploring theories which question how society is structured.  
  • All students should be able to reflect on and evaluate a range of theoretical perspectives across varied contexts.
  • To explore the causes of and solutions to some of the social problems that exist in society today.
  • Promote diversity and an appreciation of diverse experiences and cultures so that differences are understood and respected.
  • To produce more responsible and reflective members of the community.

What are the key things that our students need to learn?

  • Education:  The role and functions of education.  Differences in achievement by social groups e.g. class, gender and ethnicity.  The significance of educational policies and the extent to which they achieved greater equality of opportunity and the impact of globalisation on educational policy.

  • Family:  The relationship of the family to the social structure and social change.  Changing patterns of marriage, cohabitation, separation, divorce, childbearing and the life course, including the sociology of personal life, and the diversity of contemporary family and household structures.  Changing gender roles within the family in contemporary society.  The nature of childhood, and changes in the status of children in the family and society.  Demographic trends in the United Kingdom since 1900: birth rates, death rates, family size, life expectancy, ageing population, and migration.
  • Research Methods:  Quantitative and qualitative methods of research.  The strengths and weaknesses of research methods e.g. questionnaires, interviews, participant and non-participant observation, experiments, documents and official statistics. The strengths and weaknesses of these methods applied to an educational context. 
  • Theory: The relationship between positivism, interpretivism and sociological methods.  An understanding of consensus, conflict, structural and social action theories.  The nature of science and the extent to which Sociology can be regarded as scientific.  The debates about subjectivity, objectivity and value freedom and the relationship between Sociology and social policy.
  • Media:  The new media and its role in contemporary society.  The relationship between ownership and control of the media. The media, globalisation and its impact on popular culture.  The processes of selection and presentation of the news. Media representations of age, social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and disability.  The relationship between the media, their content and presentation, and audiences.
  • Crime & Deviance: The social distribution of crime and deviance by ethnicity, gender and social class.  Globalisation and crime in contemporary society including the media, green crime, human rights and state crimes.  Methods of crime control, surveillance, prevention and punishment.

What skills do we want our KS5 learners to have mastered by the end of KS5?

  • To be able to apply their sociological knowledge to modern global issues. 
  • To understand how society functions and influences human behaviour.
  • To be able to understand and embrace diversity. 
  • To use evidence to support and justify an argument.
  • To think critically and evaluate an argument.
  • To analyse quantitative and qualitative data.