An effective curriculum is the foundation of a good school. Yet getting it right is not easy.
Several years ago at my school, Uppingham Community College, we embarked on a journey to rethink and improve our curriculum provision. We had a broad curriculum with most departments having detailed plans in place. Student outcomes were good, and teaching and learning was very effective.
However, an audit showed a lack of sharing of expertise across some subjects where there was less rigorous planning in place, often resulting in a less progressive curriculum.
It was also apparent that we could be better at sharing our curriculum intentions with students and their parents.
We knew from our research into effective curriculums that we wanted a knowledge-rich curriculum for our students which got progressively harder each year, with effective sequencing of key concepts. This allowed us to articulate our curriculum vision: To deliver excellent teaching and learning through a coherent and consistent curriculum with embedded rigorous assessment.
Through the process of revising our curriculum provision we also aimed to share good practice across departments, empower our middle leaders and reignite their passions for their subject. We wanted them to be confident in their choices as curriculum leaders and have a clear understanding of the “golden thread” woven through their subject’s curriculum coverage.
SecEd Webinar: Clare Duffy was on our expert panel for the recent webinar Ofsted and the Curriculum, which considered effective curriculum design and recent inspection trends when it comes to curriculum scrutiny. You can watch back here (free access).
A gradual change
At the heart of our curriculum change was the desire for our whole school community to be involved to allow for the “lived” curriculum to meet their needs.
Consequently, we deliberately didn’t rush into any major curriculum alterations, planning instead for gradual change and incremental steps over a year which allowed for each step to embed and avoided overwhelming staff.
Starting with the research
Our first stage was to address the research into building an effective curriculum. Professor Dylan Wiliam (2013) explores the seven pillars of an effective curriculum as being:
- Balanced.
- Rigorous.
- Coherent.
- Vertically integrated.
- Appropriate.
- Focused.
- Relevant.
We used this as a starting point to consider where we might have gaps to address. One main area we identified was making each subject curriculum vertically integrated to promote progression in learning. We needed to make sequencing and progression of key concepts much more rigorous and coherent.
The three basics
This research prompted us to rethink our strategic approach to the whole school curriculum, stripping it down to the basics:
- What are we doing? (the curriculum)
- How are we doing it? (our pedagogy)
- Why are we doing it? (our vision or intent)
This led us to identify three basic elements of our curriculum which we wanted to see woven throughout all subjects – knowledge, understanding and skills.
Whole-school curriculum intent
Our next step was to develop a new whole-school curriculum intent. It was useful here to refer to Wiliam’s seven pillars which helped us to keep it generic and non-subject specific. We articulated what we wanted all students to experience while at our school, such as a broad and balanced curriculum, as well as a list of features:
- Clear subject intent which is reflected in the curriculum plan for each subject.
- Ambitious and challenging content.
- Clear sequence of concepts which shows that progress is planned for.
- Transferable knowledge needed for deeper understanding and skilful application.
- Assessment which has clear purpose and is deliberately planned to support learning.
- Subject curriculums that are regularly reviewed and evaluated.
After presenting this to our subject leadership team we asked them to consider the intent for each of their subject areas. We wanted them to think about why they loved their subject, what key concepts should drive their curriculum, and what every student needed to know in order to succeed. It was great to see so much enthusiasm in these conversations and staff relished the opportunity to mix things up and bring some of the joy back into their curriculums.
High-quality curriculum conversations
The work of Mary Myatt and John Tomsett in their book Huh (2021) was invaluable here in initiating high-quality curriculum conversations between staff with sections for each subject area which we directed them to read and consider.
At this point we also made use of our school improvement partner who met with each subject leader to help quality-assure their curriculum planning. These conversations resulted in each subject lead creating a curriculum intent statement – essentially their “big ideas” broken down into the knowledge, understanding and skills needed in their discipline. This was a concise one-page summary which we then used to create subject pages in the curriculum area of our school website.
Curriculum maps
One of the areas of our curriculum provision which we had identified as requiring improvement was the quality of planning in some subjects. In most departments there was a culture of sharing resources with centralised plans which teachers could personalise for their own groups.
However, this best practice was not consistent, resulting in some students not always getting the same curriculum diet or learning experience as others. We wanted to ensure that every student was given the same opportunity to succeed and that equally all staff were well supported to be the best teachers they could be by sharing expertise.
Therefore, we proposed a new way of long-term planning for subject leaders. To foster collaboration, we looked at current good planning practice across the school and leaders chose the most effective areas to keep, resulting in a shared long-term plan and template relevant to all subject areas. We called these “curriculum maps” and they included:
- Subject intent by year group.
- Units taught over the year.
- Key knowledge and concepts covered.
- Interleaving opportunities.
- Understanding gained.
- Skills learnt.
- Assessment opportunities.
Subject leaders were tasked with creating these curriculum maps for each year of the curriculum, ensuring that the knowledge covered became progressively harder and that key concepts were sequenced coherently across the years.
We emphasised that they should not need to change everything about their current curriculum – this was an opportunity to audit their curriculum, reflect on what was working well, and adapt what needed to improve. To facilitate this and ensure the best chance of success, we built into our school calendar dedicated meeting time – called Embedding Curriculum Provision – for subject teams to work together on creating these maps and the accompanying resources.
Medium-term planning
Once the curriculum maps were created our next focus was to look at medium-term planning within subjects. We wanted our schemes of learning to directly reflect what the overarching curriculum map detailed but with enough information included within them for a teacher to be able to use them effectively to inform their short-term, lesson-by-lesson planning.
There was no centralised template for these plans, allowing subject leaders to create what worked for them. Instead, we only stipulated that they should cover in some form the following:
- Learning outcomes
- Learning sequence
- Resources
- Teaching and learning strategies
- Assessments
Further Embedding Curriculum Provision time was allocated to the development of these plans and this continues to be an on-going process with lesson plans continually being evaluated and modified.
Developing a 3D curriculum
This work on curriculum allowed us to begin to make better links across subject areas. We wanted students to be able to see how knowledge and skills learnt in one subject discipline could improve their understanding in another area.
To help facilitate this we had a subject leader planning meeting where we investigated these links, allowing for changes to be made in sequencing of key concepts so they better aligned across subjects. This resulted in the creation of whole year group curriculum maps divided between arts subjects and science subjects where the links were explicit.
This joined-up approach also allowed us to build in more generic cross-subject requirements to the curriculum, such as whole school literacy and SEND provision.
Both the subject and year curriculum maps were placed in the curriculum area of our website allowing for greater transparency for parents. We also started to include the maps as hyperlinks in each report that went home so parents could quickly and easily see what their child was studying in relation to progress.
On-going evolution
To ensure curriculum remains a high priority for our subject leaders it is now built into our internal quality assurance processes. Each year every subject has a department self-review led by the subject leader and their senior leadership team link. Curriculum conversations form an integral part of this, looking at rationale and planning along with impact on teaching and learning.
Final thoughts
To any school embarking on a curriculum review we learnt the following from our experience:
- Consider your school context.
- The importance of staff buy-in and subject enthusiasm is crucial.
- Use distributed leadership.
- Plan for incremental steps and set deadlines.
- Be sensible with your expectations of staff and use directed time to help reduce workload.
- Build on existing good practice and staff expertise.
- Collaborate and share successes.
- The process is never finished.
Clare Duffy is deputy principal (teaching and learning and CPD) at Uppingham Community College in Rutland. Follow her on X (Twitter) @ClareHDuffy and find her previous articles and webinar/podcast appearances for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/clare-duffy
Further information & resources
- Myatt & Tomsett: Huh: Curriculum conversations between subject and senior leaders, John Catt Educational, 2021.
- Wiliam: Redesigning Schooling 3: Principled curriculum design, SSAT, 2013.