In my 2016 book, Making KS3 Count, there’s a section called Making curriculum count in which I advocate a more joined-up approach to curriculum design. I also encourage schools to plan engaging curriculums that do more than merely prepare students for qualifications.
I wrote that book in 2015 – a time when it was becoming increasingly clear that the school curriculum had too often become synonymous with the national curriculum or, worse still, the timetable.
This led to my 2019 book, School & College Curriculum Design, a guide to designing an ambitious, broad, and balanced, planned, and sequenced, and inclusive curriculum.
I was in the middle of writing the book when Amanda Spielman became the chief inspector of Ofsted. In one of her first speeches she trumpeted the importance of the school curriculum, arguing that schools had lost sight of the real substance of education.
She said that many school practices reflected “a tendency to mistake badges and stickers for learning itself (and put) the interests of schools ahead of the interests of the children in them”.
Of course, it was not difficult to see why such behaviour had persisted: the government’s accountability system, centred on performance tables, was at the heart of the matter, aided and abetted by Spielman’s own organisation, of course!
I had already formulated a six-step process for tackling curriculum design that would sit at the heart of my book when Ofsted began consulting on a new Education Inspection Framework (EIF).
My six-step process posited that schools needed to be clearer about the purpose of education in their institutions and to have a well-defined idea of what success should look like at the end of learners’ journeys.
It also embodied an approach to sequencing learning and to ensuring ambition for all while better understanding the causes and tackling the consequences of academic disadvantage.
At the same time, Ofsted’s draft EIF said schools should identify ambitious “end-points” and talked of using the curriculum to tackle social justice issues.
As such, when the book came out, the response was fantastic. Many schools adopted my six-step model to redesign their curriculums.
A second instalment – on how curriculum plans can be translated into classroom practice – published in 2020. And, in 2021, the final instalment explored ways of evaluating curriculum design and delivery and improving assessment.
Now this term all three books have been abridged, refined, updated, and published in one volume – entitled Intent Implementation Impact: How to design and deliver an ambitious school curriculum – by Spark Education Books. To mark this occasion and to help you on your own curriculum journey, here are some curriculum self-evaluation questions taken from the book.
Intent
A good curriculum is a living organism, forever changing in response to reality. Curriculum design, therefore, should be a cyclical process. A curriculum should not be designed then left to stagnate. Rather, we should design a curriculum, teach it, assess it to see if it is working, then redesign it in light of our findings.
The self-evaluation questions below are not exhaustive but they all help us to answer a simple overarching question: Is your curriculum working for all your learners?
Is our curriculum ambitious enough?
- Does our curriculum teach the knowledge and skills learners need to take advantage of the opportunities, responsibilities, and experiences of later life?
- Does our curriculum reflect our school’s local context? Does it address typical gaps in learners’ knowledge and skills?
- Does our curriculum bring the local community into school and take learners out into the community?
- Does our curriculum respond to our learners’ particular life experiences?
- Is our curriculum sufficiently broad to ensure learners are taught as many different subject disciplines as possible for as long as possible?
- Is our curriculum sufficiently balanced so that each subject discipline has a fair amount of space on the timetable to deliver both breadth and depth?
- Are learners able to study a strong academic core of subjects but also afforded a well-rounded education including in the arts?
- Do we account for the hidden curriculum and ensure there are no inconsistencies or contradictions between what we explicitly teach in lessons and what we teach by way of the values, behaviours, and attitudes all our staff display daily, and by the quality of the learning environment and our rules and routines?
Have we identified the right destinations?
- Is it clear what “end-points” we are building towards as a school and in each subject discipline that we teach?
- Is it clear what our learners need to know and be able to do at each stage to reach those end-points?
- Will these end-points fully prepare learners for the next stage of their education, employment, and lives?
- Do we make explicit links between related end-points within and across subject disciplines?
- As well as subject-specific knowledge and skills, do we also identify the research and study skills – and indeed other cross-curricular skills – that our learners need to succeed?
- Are skills explicitly taught and reinforced? Are they taught consistently across all subjects where applicable?
- Do we ensure that the end-points of each part of our curriculum seamlessly join to the starting points of the next and so on, so that we achieve curriculum continuity and so that transitions between the various years, key stages and phases of education are as possible?
Have we planned and sequenced our curriculum effectively?
- Does our planning ensure that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before and towards these clearly defined end-points?
- Is there an appropriate pace that allows for sufficient breadth and depth?
- Is content taught in a logical progression, systematically and explicitly enough for all learners to acquire the intended knowledge and skills?
- Is there an appropriate level of challenge for all?
- Does our progression model allow for a mastery approach where the higher-performing learners are sufficiently stretched and lower-performing learners are effectively supported, and yet the integrity of our teaching sequence is still maintained so that no learner runs too far ahead or falls too far behind?
- Do we bake retrieval practice into our curriculum to ensure we activate prior knowledge as and when appropriate and keep that prior knowledge accessible to learners so that they can make connections between what they learned yesterday, what they’re learning today, and what they will learn tomorrow?
- Does our use of retrieval practice enable learners to forge ever-more complex schemata in long-term memory and aide automaticity?
Does our curriculum help to tackle social justice issues?
- Have we planned to teach the knowledge and cultural capital our learners need to access and understand our curriculum and go on to thrive in later life?
- Are there high academic ambitions for all learners and do we offer disadvantaged learners and those with SEND the same curriculum experience as their peers rather than “dumb-down” or reduce the offer?
- Do we identify the barriers some learners face in school and within each subject discipline, including though not solely a potential vocabulary deficit, and do we plan effective support strategies to help overcome those barriers?
- Whenever we use additional intervention and support strategies to help disadvantaged learners and those with SEND, do we monitor their effectiveness as they are happening rather than wait to evaluate their eventual success once they have ended?
Implementation
You should also evaluate how well the curriculum is translated into practice in the classroom.
Do teachers have expert knowledge of the subjects they teach?
- If not, are they being supported to address gaps in their knowledge so that learners are not disadvantaged by ineffective teaching?
- Does the school support an effective programme of subject-specific professional development as well as training on generic pedagogy?
- Do the teachers assigned to each cohort, each year group and each level and type of qualification have the knowledge and experience to teach it well? Thus: is timetabling as effective as it could be?
Do teachers enable learners to understand key concepts, presenting information clearly?
- Are teacher explanations effective – for example, do they make use of dual coding?
- Do teachers also model thinking aloud for learners to make the invisible visible and the implicit explicit?
- Do teachers explicitly teach the language – including tier 2 and 3 vocabulary – that learners need in order to understand the curriculum?
- Do teachers articulate clear learning outcomes and make explicit what learners should know and be able to do at the end of each sequence of lessons?
- Do teachers establish routines for classroom discussions so that all learners contribute fairly and in order that debate deepens learners’ understanding?
- Do teachers make use of “live” low-stakes assessment practices such as hinge questions and exit tickets to assess learners’ understanding and to identify the gaps in their knowledge and skills, as well as their misunderstandings?
- Do they use these assessments to inform their planning and teaching so that lesson planning is fluid and responsive, rather than something to stick to religiously?
Do teachers ensure that learners embed key concepts in their long-term memory and apply them fluently?
- Is the subject curriculum taught in such a way that helps learners to transfer key knowledge to long-term memory?
- Do teachers gain the active attention of learners’ working memories and make them think hard but efficiently about curriculum content? Once encoded into long-term memory, do teachers provide plenty of opportunities for retrieval practice to ensure knowledge in long-term memory is brought back into working memory so that it remains accessible, and so as to encourage learners to apply that knowledge in different contexts?
- Is prior learning linked to new learning?
- Are explicit links made between different parts of the curriculum and indeed across curriculum areas to help make knowledge transferable and useable?
- Is teaching sequenced in practice not just in lesson plans so that learners acquire the knowledge and skills needed to complete each task before they are asked to complete it, and so that new knowledge and skills logically build on what has been taught before enabling learners to make progress towards clearly defined end-points?
Do teachers use formative assessment to check learners’ understanding (to inform planning and teaching) and to help learners embed and use knowledge fluently and develop their own understanding?
- Do all these assessments have a clear purpose?
- Do assessments provide valid data on which the teacher can and does act?
- Is the feedback garnered from assessments meaningful and motivating to learners?
- Does feedback and assessment help students to close the gap between their current performance and their desired performance?
- Is time set aside every time feedback is given to learners so that they can process it, question it if needed, and act upon it in class while the teacher is present to provide support, challenge, and encouragement?
- How do I assess the extent to which learners transfer key concepts into long-term memory and can apply them fluently and what do I do with the findings?
Impact
You should measure eventual outcomes so that you can determine what learners have achieved and the extent to which your curriculum planning and the way in which you have translated those plans into classroom practice have enabled learners to achieve what you intended.
We must also ensure that we have not perpetuated or opened any attainment gaps.
Remember: the purpose of education is not just certification but to prepare learners for the next stage of their education, employment, and lives. So, what does this look like?
Judging impact
- What might you assess to make a judgement about the impact of your curriculum on learner outcomes?
How do we prepare learners for the next stage of their lives?
- Where do our learners go next and does this represent a positive step in the right direction for them?
- Do we prepare learners for their next steps beyond subject qualifications? For example, how effective is our provision of character education, RSE and PSHE, Fundamental British values, etc?
- Do we run an ambitious programme of extra-curricular and enrichment activities which take learners beyond the academic curriculum and the taught timetable?
- Do we develop oracy skills, perhaps through a debating society?
What does our hidden curriculum look like and is it consistent with the taught curriculum?
- What messages does our hidden curriculum send to learners?
- What do the words and actions of all the adults in school say to learners about what values and attitudes matter most in life, and about how to behave as citizens and employees?
How do we develop learners’ skills?
- Are the skills that learners need in order to be prepared for their next steps explicitly planned and taught?
- Are skills developed as “transferable” or through subject disciplines in domain-specific ways? (You may decide that some skills are transferable because they are used in many subjects and in similar ways. Take, for example, structuring an argument, working in a team, giving feedback to a peer, internet research, note-taking, and so on).
Is the information, advice, and guidance we provide impartial and effective?
- Do you offer effective and impartial careers guidance and advice on further qualifications to study?
- Do learners know their options for the next stage of their education, employment, and lives? Are they able to make informed decisions?
- Does future planning, including thinking about career options, help foster intrinsic motivation and lend purpose to learners’ current studies?
Do we help learners to make smooth transitions?
- Do you help learners adjust to all the changes they face while in education? This includes the transition between schools as well as between the various phases, stages, and years of education.
- Matt Bromley is an education journalist, author, and advisor with 25 years’ experience in teaching and leadership including as a secondary school headteacher and academy principal and multi-academy trust director. Matt is the lead lecturer on a national initial teacher training programme as well as a school improvement advisor. He remains a practising teacher. Matt is the author of numerous books on education and co-host of the award-winning SecEd Podcast. Find him on X (Twitter) @mj_bromley. Read his previous articles for SecEd via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/matt-bromley
Further information & resources
- Intent Implementation Impact: How to design and deliver an ambitious school curriculum was published by Spark Education Books. Visit https://autus.group/books/
- For more free help and advice from Matt, including training videos, visit www.bromleyeducation.co.uk