Improving Curriculum

Over the last couple of years, we’ve invested a lot of time and thought into improving our curriculum. In line with others, our leadership focus has shifted from considering ‘the lesson’ to be the most significant unit to a recognition of the power of underlying structures which support learning over time. We are convinced that a well-organised, expertly-designed curriculum, with exceptionally high-quality approaches to assessment, represent the best way to improve learning in our school. It’s not easy work; the process of improving curriculum content requires time, reflection and much professional skill. Here, in no particular order and knowing that we could have done this differently and no doubt better, are some of the ways that we’ve tried to work as school leaders to promote positive  change.

1 – Be clear about the direction and rationale

In our case, we committed to the following principles for features of curriculum and assessment. 

These were written up into a strategy document and shared with staff, with feedback invited. Some very purposeful and useful conversations and dialogue came out of this process, leading to the launch of an official Curriculum, Assessment and Teaching policy Whilst far from perfect, the attempt to articulate exactly what we mean along with some rationale for why has been important; selecting development planning outcomes directly from the CAT policy, for example, adds coherence and precision to our curriculum work. The title is important - aside from the catchy feline acronym, it makes clear that a quality curriculum is the starting point, without which attention to teacher delivery is meaningless.

2 – Give time and autonomy

Making even relatively minor changes to curriculum content is very challenging; planning, resourcing, training, communicating and teaching all demand considerable expertise, attention and time from everyone involved. It’s therefore essential that if a move towards a knowledge-richer curriculum is the goal, we don’t ask teachers or leaders to do much else for a couple of years. This means the vast majority of available INSET and CPD time being dedicated to faculty teams, development planning being explicitly linked to curriculum improvement, and as much support by way of cover as can sensibly be provided. Generating resources (knowledge organisers, assessments, language resources etc) is key here – using INSET time to get things done, rather than sit around ‘being trained’, has been an essential strategy.

The autonomy element raises interesting questions about style and approach; it’s tempting for leaders to prescribe key resources: every subject should have knowledge organisers in this format, every subject should use PLCs, everyone must use  this common planning format etc. We’ve shied away from this on the whole, largely through concerns about creating laborious administrative tasks which aren’t universally required or helpful. If the principles of the policy are being enacted, and there’s a strong rationale for the formats being used within a subject area, that’s OK. Interestingly, we’ve found that it leads to much better quality and inter-faculty sharing in the long term.

3 – Be actively interested in the detail; have an opinion.

One implication of the growth of interest in curriculum content has been the need for leaders – particularly SLT – to gain a much more informed understanding of the specific content being covered. We run meetings three times each year between myself, faculty leadership and the SLT link for that area. One of these meetings is dedicated entirely to curriculum at KS3, and involves listening to and discussing the rationale for the specific content being delivered, and the resources provided to students and teachers. My view is that, whilst in the past SLT have not often tended to be involved in discussion of the detail, it’s actually a core responsibility of any senior team.  If you are a senior leader in a school, particularly with any curriculum responsibility, the day-to-day content being taught in all subjects should be high on your list of priorities to give your attention; it’s fundamental to your job.

This means being prepared to question, to have opinions, to play devil’s advocate and to challenge assumptions, even when outside of your own subject expertise. It’s about moving beyond the requirement to specify content, and towards a willingness to question the quality and appropriateness of the content being proposed: is this the very best that we can be sending students out into the world knowing? Why? What’s the rationale to support our view? Whilst feeling slightly odd at first, these discussions have been brilliant, leading to ongoing dialogue, change where agreement has been reached, and an overall sense of the importance of getting the choices of taught content as clear, reasoned and convincing as possible.

4 – Focus on high quality assessment

If asked to select the one factor which brings about the most positive changes most quickly, the introduction of more refined approaches to assessment would be my choice. For us, this has meant introducing a policy expectation that approaches to formative assessment are high quality, and are standardised across each subject. In most cases, this takes the form of a knowledge-focused short answer or multiple choice test, which provides precise information as to which ideas, facts and concepts students have and have not understood. Rather than a whole-school assessment approach, each faculty has devised their own assessment policy and practice, which works in the context of the subject in question and pays attention to the principles in the CAT policy.

The key difference here is that the quality of formative assessment becomes the responsibility of leadership, rather than putting that demand largely on each individual teacher. In most cases, this has meant the removal of impact-light book marking in favour of standardised, effective formative testing. Daisy Christodoulou’s work has been central in helping us to focus on the design and effectiveness of the assessments; Making Good Progress? has helped us to cross new frontiers in terms of our professional expectations of ourselves, by focusing attention on technical aspects of assessment design. It’s felt like a real step forward – such interesting and rich work to undertake, and an invigorating change from our historic primary  focus on lessons and delivery.

Conclusions

So has any of this actually done any good? Whilst wary of generating the visceral levels of irritation caused by people banging on about ‘good results’ on social media, results are strong. English is an example where we would be confident that approaches to improving curriculum have made a difference; in fact I’d argue that English is perhaps the subject area nationally where improvement in curriculum is most likely to result in genuine improvements to  learning. This is down to a combination of two factors: one is that English teaching  (literature in particular) benefits hugely from high levels of organisation and curricular specification of high quality knowledge; the other is that English is also the subject where  specified knowledge and assessment is often weak, vague or limited. 

When talking to some of our most successful students to get their views on how they had learnt to write about literature so beautifully, a recurring idea was that they’d been taught higher quality content than is typical; harder, more sophisticated material that their friends hadn’t been exposed to. Examples where we see this in English curriculum planning and resourcing include advanced approaches to poetry, Aristotelian rhetoric, and deep engagement with literary context. 

Overall then, our experience in working to improve curriculum has been fascinating and rewarding. As ever, we are indebted to all of those writing so insightfully on social media, and I hope that the above proves helpful to schools interested in this area.