School leaders committed to meaningful curriculum design would cover most, if not all, of what is needed to reshape what students learn in their schools if they followed the advisory bullet-points below, especially if they emphasised the importance of effective implementation:
- Learn about the curriculum for themselves.
- Show humility by using the language of support rather than the language of accountability when it comes to working with subject leaders on developing the curriculum.
- Agree the principles of any curriculum redesign, using Dylan Wiliam’s Principled Curriculum Design as a starting point.
- Define the general terms used to discuss curriculum design, without over-complicating things.
- Set up a Curriculum Development Group (CDG) comprised of middle leaders and led by the middle leader who has the greatest expertise and is most likely to be trusted by his or her peers to orchestrate the work.
- Remind colleagues that we have been developing our curriculum for years – constantly build upon what you have already, like painting the Forth Road Bridge.
- Give a generous time-frame for curriculum review – three years for a complete overall is reasonable.
- Provide time for expert training of middle leaders on curriculum development during CDG meetings.
- Insist that all members of SLT are trained in curriculum development and work alongside the subject leaders they line manage when they are reviewing their subjects’ curricula.
- Ensure that curriculum development work is privileged on training days and at subject meetings.
- Seek expert support if required – especially in niche subjects like Computer Science.
- Stress that the debate about the curriculum is central to curriculum development – there is no off-the-shelf quick fix to developing a challenging curriculum for your students.
- Fund membership of Subject Associations, which extend the curriculum conversation beyond the confines of your school or MAT.
- Encourage teachers to join local subject-based curriculum groups and give them time to attend meetings.
- Emphasise that the National Curriculum is the starting point upon which any individual school curriculum should be based – we are not starting from scratch.
- Encourage curriculum development which has local colour; living in York is a gift for any history teacher and I know one school which begins Year 7 with a tourist bus ride around the city for the whole year group.
- Ensure that a senior leader co-ordinates the curriculum towards vertical coherence – teach The First World War in history in the term before English teach The War Poets, not the term after…
- Stress repeatedly that any curriculum development is not about pleasing the regulator, but providing a challenging curriculum for all our students.
Tag: John Tomsett
We reckon you could keep just 13 secondary-aged students socially distant in an average classroom. If we returned to school after Easter, to ensure over 1,700 people remained safely socially distant we would need twice the number of classrooms and twice as many teachers. We would require many more buses to get them there. And how we would feed everyone, when we would be stuck in the same room all day, I cannot quite imagine.
I think that this crisis is showing how important schools are with the cycle of things. Not just for the learning, but the care that it provides children. In Victoria, Australia the request is that anyone who can should learn from home, however this does not work for everyone. However, what you touch upon is the space and structure required to cater for this.