Best Practice

Middle leadership: Leading the curriculum

Curriculum Middle leadership
In a five-part series on middle leadership, Adam Riches will be offering advice and tips on excelling in all aspects of this vital role in schools. In article three, he looks at planning and leading a subject curriculum


Having an outstanding curriculum is the basis for success of any department and, in fact, any school.

However, defining what you teach, how you teach it, when you teach it, and most importantly the effectiveness of what is being taught can be a difficult job.

As a middle leader, it is important to consider a range of factors when it comes to your curriculum planning. Leading your team on a day-to-day basis is made significantly easier if you all have a clear idea of what the expectations are.

The job comes with a lot of responsibility too. Curriculum content needs to be engaging and stimulating, but there are also a number of boxes to tick when it comes to skills, knowledge and understanding. So how can middle leaders approach this mammoth task in a way which is effective and efficient?


Effective Middle Leadership Series

Part 1: The principles of effective middle leadership: Published August 31. Click here.
Part 2: Six middle leadership styles: Published September 7. Click here.
Part 3: Leading the subject curriculum: This article
Part 4: Assessing and quality assuring teaching as a middle leader: Published September 20. Click here.
Part 5: Collective efficacy for your team: Published September 26. Click here.


Consider the intent of your curriculum

It is important to first consider the intention of what you are trying to achieve. Having a clear curriculum intent – to use Ofsted’s terminology as we all now must – means that you equip yourself with clarity of destination benefitting you as a leader and also your team as a collective.

As a middle leader, the curriculum that you plan for your subject should reflect your vision, or at least the vision of your school. Consideration needs to be paid of course to the end-of-course requirements – e.g. what is expected of students in their exams – but there are other factors to consider too.

The curriculum needs to be both broad and balanced. Skills, knowledge and understanding need attention, we must adhere to the national curriculum but also build learners’ cultural and social capital alongside academic expectations.

It can be a fine balance between preparing learners for exams and exposing them to a wider breadth of material that may prepare them for later life – as middle leaders, you need to find this balance and be able to justify it.

The next step is looking at how you will sequence your curriculum content. Look at the curriculum as a whole. Using a spiral model where learners frequently revisit previously taught skills and content can support retention. Using a mastery model and blocking learning into sequenced chunks also has benefits. You need to decide what will work best in your context.

One thing to keep in mind is the sheer power of an interleaved and interweaved curriculum. Cognitive science and generative learning theory shows us that we must consider the gaps between exposure to maximise memory – certainly keep this in mind when thinking about when you teach what.

It is vital that you can disseminate the huge amount of detail and planning of your curriculum intent to your staff. Package the final product clearly and transparently. Take time to help your team understand the reasoning behind your curriculum and get them to see why you do what you do when you do. Not only will this help significantly with the collective efficacy of your team and the delivery of your curriculum, but it will also put you in good stead if and when Ofsted conducts a deep dive.


Implementation

Once you are clear with what you want to do and which order you want to do it in, you need to actually teach it!

The first step will be the creation of the resources required to deliver the skills, knowledge and understanding included in your curriculum content. For the planning and subsequent delivery, there is one pivotal factor for success – subject knowledge. Without prerequisite knowledge, it is impossible for you and your team to effectively deliver what is required.

As a middle leader, you need to be an expert in all areas of your curriculum so that you can model and support others with the content. Take time to ensure that your teachers are skilled and supported to confidently plan and deliver the material and make time to work with colleagues to identify areas for development and CPD. Role-model this yourself too.

When you are underway and your curriculum is being taught in the classroom, it is important that you then take time to observe that your vision and intent is being reflected in lessons. Having a plan is great, but it is of paramount importance that you gain and maintain an awareness of what is happening on the ground.

This may mean that you need to actively quality-assure the teaching of the curriculum, or that you need to look in books to see if your intentions are being fulfilled. This does take time, but for you to be a successful middle leader you need to be informed.

Coupled with the quality of delivery is the level of progress and acquisition – in reality, you need to check to see if the curriculum you have designed is effective for learners and that it is sticking.

This is where assessment comes in. However you might do this, you must check three factors: knowledge, understanding, and skills. Using different approaches – such as multiple-choice questions, short answers and longer answer questions – is a good way to test this and remember that this doesn’t always need to be summative.

If you don’t take the time to embed affective assessment protocols, your teaching team may not be able to identify gaps in students’ learning nor effectively adapt your content accordingly.


Take time to reflect and adapt

We must ensure we are adaptable. That said, changes to curriculum should be managed carefully – too many and you lose consistency across your team; too few and you don’t address areas of weakness.

Although it is easy as a middle leader to be lulled into a false sense of confidence by anecdotal successes, like your team saying how well the curriculum is working or students saying how much they love it, we must face the reality that we need to have the evidence to prove it.

As such, you need to think about what the data is showing you when looking at the effectiveness of your curriculum. If there are clear gaps or dips in certain years, there needs to be consideration of the desirable difficulty or the content for that year or group to ensure that they are being taught the right things at the right times.

In addition, a part of your responsibility as a middle leader will inevitably be to justify the effectiveness of your curriculum to senior leadership – again, unfortunately, data speaks volumes in these situations.

That said, you need to strike a balance and the opinions of those teaching and those learning the curriculum should be a factor in your evaluation too. We have to remember why we are in the classroom and listening to our pupils and staff can be a huge motivating factor when it comes to the success of the curriculum.


Final thought

It is so important to be clear at all times when it comes to curriculum-planning. Get your team and students on board and you're away.


Further information & resources