How to make sure your curriculum foundations are solid
The current focus on curriculum presents enormous opportunity but also risks, so it’s essential to make sure the foundations are sound, says Jon Hutchinson…
Curriculum is the undisputed buzzword of 2019 and, just like you, I couldn’t be more delighted.
How very exciting that we can take some time to think really deeply about what we teach our pupils, when, and in how much detail.
Exciting and a bit terrifying, but mainly exciting! Oh god, did Ofsted just mention curriculum? What do they want? And what’s this email from SLT? Knowledge organisers for every topic to be uploaded by the end of the week? Maybe it isn’t so exciting after all…
So let’s all stop and take a deep breath. We need to be really careful to get this right, because unlike other trendy initiatives to sweep through education, curriculum is the very backbone of a school.
It is not something that can be fixed and set out in a single SLT meeting, or during the morning of an INSET day. It can’t be outsourced to a consultant or bought in from one of the companies barraging your inbox with a simple solution for a hefty price.
Challenge
The first step in making things right is accepting that there is a problem. This is difficult. We are all fiercely proud of our schools and what we offer our pupils.
But we have to take a fresh, honest look at the different subject areas and question everything. Sure, we may know that in Y4 we ‘do the Romans’ but are we clear on exactly what that means?
What, specifically, we will guarantee all children remember? What knowledge they will need? What sort of concepts, events and people we would like them to remember in depth, so that links can be made cumulatively over a period of years?
This, of course, is an almost comically monumental task. With 13 statutory subjects at KS2, and dozens of topics contained within each, a truly detailed curriculum plan is a project that will take years to even begin to sketch out.
In fact, at my school, Reach Academy, we have been thinking very hard about curriculum for the last three years, in only a few of the foundation subjects, and we feel like we’re just getting started.
Solution
We have, however, worked hard at developing a particular approach that we feel can be adapted to lots of different subjects and units, and in different schools, too.
Earlier this year, we were successful in securing funding from the DfE’s Curriculum Fund, the aim of which is to promote programmes of study at KS2 and KS3 that are knowledge-rich, coherently sequenced and evidence informed.
Over the course of this series of articles, we’ll be exploring in depth some of the key elements of our curriculum programmes, which you might like to build into your units of work.
Throughout, we will review some of the research that underpins the different elements of this curriculum approach, ensuring that our thinking is informed by the best available evidence.
We’ll also provide some examples of the materials that we have developed to help act as models and generate discussion within your schools.
Ofsted
Before we do that, though, let’s take a moment to give the Ofsted elephant in the room a good, hard stare, and separate the fact from the fiction.
Nothing muddies decision making and compromises good intentions like second guessing the inspectorate, and so it’s worth being really clear on what the new inspection handbook – released in draft a few months ago – indicates.
In a nutshell, Ofsted has proposed to shift the focus away from performance data and towards the whole curriculum being offered to pupils.
This means that school leaders will no longer be able to bamboozle inspectors with spreadsheet after spreadsheet of arbitrary numbers and letters.
Instead, conversations will be held around precisely what leaders intend for pupils to learn, how these intentions are implemented, and what sort of outcomes are being achieved.
Accordingly, a new judgement will be included within inspection reports: ‘quality of education’. This won’t need to be completed overnight.
Ofsted has indicated that it will give schools the time and space they need to develop something that is right for their context. And although there are no quick and easy solutions, that doesn’t mean that everyone needs to start from scratch.
There are shortcuts available, and models that can give leaders and teachers a launchpad to refine and develop their own curricula thinking. If it isn’t too forward, we’d like to share a bit of what we’ve been doing at our little school, in case it might be of any help.
Curriculum model
Let’s return to the distinction made by our friends at Ofsted towers between curriculum intent, implementation and impact. The intended curriculum includes the high-level things that you would like pupils to learn.
This could be the titles of topics to be studied, or the selection of books to be read.
The implemented curriculum considers the bits and bobs that are required to actually teach the stuff – things like schemes of work, textbooks and worksheets that will be used in lessons.
Finally, impact concerns whether what you hoped would be learned, has been. In primary we are pretty good at keeping a close eye on what is being achieved in English and maths, but we perhaps aren’t so good at checking in on history or design and technology in the same way.
The national curriculum provides us with a good starting point for the intended curriculum.
At Reach, we began by mapping out the different statutory units (plus a few extras) in a sequence that we think makes sense for the pupils (in history, for example, we teach chronologically from prehistoric Britain in Y2, to the Cold War at the end of Y6).
We then write a knowledge organiser for each unit, setting out the core, crucial facts that need to be remembered to master the topic.
Next, a work booklet is written which includes all of the key information written in age-appropriate language. All of the questions, images, diagrams and activities are also included in this booklet.
This means that our teachers don’t have to stay up until midnight on a Sunday writing worksheets from scratch.
They can focus on developing their subject knowledge, and thinking about the ‘enacted’ curriculum, how they will bring the lesson to life and explain the content in a clear, engaging and exciting way.
Leaders can have clarity in exactly what is being taught, ensuring that each year can build upon the last, and edifices of knowledge and understanding about the world can be carefully constructed within each child.
Reviewing the impact of the curriculum (the essays the pupils write, their work within the booklets, how they talk about their topic) allows us to return to the implemented and intended levels of curriculum to tweak and refine.
Curriculum development, then, never ends. It is an ongoing process; a conversation. People from the whole community should be invited into this conversation, making each curriculum unique and special.
I hope that over the course of this year, sharing our conversation will help you to start your own.
Find all six articles in this series on taking a curriculum deep dive, here.
Jon Hutchinson is assistant headteacher at Reach Academy Feltham. Follow him on Twitter at @jon_hutchinson_.
