What is Bedrock Learning?

As internationally renowned vocabulary expert Andrew Biemiller puts it: “If we are serious about increasing standards and bringing a greater proportion of school children to high levels of academic accomplishments, we cannot leave vocabulary development to parents, chance and highly motivated reading.”
This sentiment helped inspire our founders – former English teachers – to launch Bedrock Learning in 2015. We created Bedrock Vocabulary, our online curriculum, to teach students the academic words they need to succeed in school and beyond. Students from 6 to 18 years old can use Bedrock as part of their learning in school, independently at home or as part of your remote or blended learning strategy.
A wide vocabulary is essential to both strong academic performance across the curriculum and success beyond formal education. We immerse students in aspirational, academic ‘Tier 2’ vocabulary – which includes words like ‘analyse’, ‘emulate’, ‘integral’ and ‘verify’ – in a way that’s accessible, student friendly, and ensures reliable, statistically significant progress.
Bedrock Vocabulary is a ten-year programme split into one-year blocks. Our broad and rich curriculum immerses students in academic vocabulary, whilst ensuring learners read interesting fiction and non-fiction texts.
A short test at the start of each learner’s journey with us ensures their learning is tailored to their needs. All members can have access to our 37 Common Roots unit, designed to improve students’ understanding of unfamiliar words by teaching common Greek and Latin roots such as cycl-, spec- and chron-.
In addition to our core Bedrock Vocabulary curriculum, we also offer Bedrock GCSE – interactive schemes specially designed to support study at GCSE level, from Years 9-11. Find out more about 102 GCSE English Terms and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Why teachers, students and parents love Bedrock
Bedrock benefits for teachers
✓ Offers a time-saving, self-marking, ready-made curriculum
✓ Can be set as homework – freeing up valuable class time – and form part of your blended learning strategy
✓ Statistically proven to improve students’ vocabulary – a critical factor in academic success across the curriculum
✓ Includes cross-curricular topics to support learning across the National Curriculum
✓ Suitable for students of all abilities and backgrounds
✓ Uses human narration in multiple contexts
✓ Uses spaced learning to ensure long-term memory retention
✓ Can support questions Ofsted may ask about your school’s literacy teaching as part of their new inspection framework
✓ Unlimited free support via phone, email and live chat
Bedrock benefits for students
✓ Tailored to individual learning level, right from the beginning
✓ Learning adapts to each student’s unique pace
✓ Accessible from home
✓ Wide range of engaging texts expand world knowledge as well as vocabulary
✓ Gives instant feedback on learning progress
✓ Certificates celebrate students’ success!
Bedrock benefits for parents
✓ Access to your child’s unique dashboard shows individual words your child has learned and is still learning, as well as overall progress
✓ Provides an understanding of child’s learning, making it easy to support as a family
✓ Our research shows parents believe using Bedrock improves their child’s written vocabulary and reading skills, and makes children more engaged across the school curriculum
See How does Bedrock work? for more information about getting set up, using Bedrock, and understanding progress.