What curriculum do Christian schools use?
Programmes, amounts and rules change. Before acting on anything here, check the current details with the official source named in the answer.
There is no single Christian school curriculum. Schools choose their own materials, and the most familiar pattern is a published Christian curriculum used across most subjects, sometimes from one publisher and sometimes mixed by subject. The two long established full range publishers are Abeka and BJU Press. Abeka, based at Pensacola Christian College, describes its programme as comprehensive, biblically based curriculum, textbooks and teaching aids for preschool through grade 12, built on a spiral learning approach. BJU Press states that it produces a full complement of pre-K through grade 12 educational materials with a biblical worldview for Christian students, teachers and parents. A school using one of these across the timetable will look and feel quite textbook led, with teacher editions, tests and a set scope and sequence for each grade.
Other publishers fill particular parts of the timetable. Purposeful Design Publications is the publishing division of the Association of Christian Schools International and has provided textbooks rooted in biblical truth since the mid 1980s, including Bible, mathematics, science and language arts series that schools often use for some subjects alongside another publisher for the rest. In classical Christian schools, Memoria Press is a common choice: its Classical Core Curriculum centres on Latin, the civilizations of Greece and Rome, and reading from the Great Books. Apologia is common specifically in science, where its Exploring Creation and Young Explorer series present elementary through high school science, including biology, chemistry and physics, from a biblical worldview with hands on experiments and lab work.
Many schools blend. A school might use BJU Press for history, Purposeful Design for Bible and spelling, Apologia for secondary science, and its own or a secular publisher's materials for a subject such as mathematics or a foreign language, and a classical school's book list will look different again from a conventional school's. Curriculum is a real difference between schools, in pace, homework load and how faith is integrated inside ordinary subjects, so ask for the actual list by grade and subject, and ask to see a textbook and a week of work. The comparison page on this site sets the main options side by side.
Sources: Abeka, programme pages (comprehensive biblically based curriculum for Preschool to Grade 12); BJU Press, About BJU Press page (full Pre-K through Grade 12 materials with a biblical worldview); Association of Christian Schools International, Purposeful Design Publications pages; Memoria Press, Memoria Press Curriculum and Classical Core Curriculum pages; Apologia, science curriculum pages (Young Explorer and Exploring Creation series); Find Christian Schools, /curriculum-comparison page. Checked October 2026.