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Ofsted and the curriculum
We talk to Ofsted's curriculum unit, teachers who've been involved in curriculum planning and a Head and subject lead who've recently been inspected about the deep dives they experienced.
Chris Jones
Hi everybody and welcome to the latest episode of Ofsted Talks, the Ofsted podcast. Today's subject is the curriculum. I'd like to introduce my new co-host Shreena Kotecha. Hi Shreena.
Shreena Kotecha: Hi Chris.
Chris Jones: Very nice to have you with us. I've also got some fantastic guests today. I've got Heather Fearn and Jonathan Keay from Ofsted's curriculum unit. Do you want to say hi, hello. Hi both. And I also have fantastic school leaders to help us talk about the thorny subject of the curriculum. I'm gonna let them introduce themselves. I've got Ruth Ashbee, Ruth...
Ruth Ashbee
Hi, Chris. Hi, everyone. I'm Ruth Ashbee. I'm a senior deputy head at Holly Lodge High School in Smethwick in the West Midlands and also vice chair of governors at Millbrae school where I live in Shrewsbury.
Chris Jones
Excellent thank you, Ruth, and we also have Steve Mastin. Hi, Steve.
Steve Mastin
Hi, everyone. My name is Steve Mastin. I was a secondary school head of history for last 17 years.
Chris Jones
Excellent. Welcome, Steve. Welcome, Ruth. And thanks very much to Jonathan and Heather for joining us as well.
Shreena Kotecha:
Jonathan and Heather, do you want to start just by kind of telling us in a nutshell, what is the curriculum and why should we care?
Heather Fearn:
Focus on curriculum is the focus on what it is that pupils learn what chiefest spectacles the substance of education? So I think for quite a long time in schools there's been a focus when thinking about what was quality teaching on what perhaps what teaching methods were used, whether there were particular ways of teaching different sorts of activities, which would be considered more or less effective than others. And that had meant there wasn't as much emphasis on what it was that pupils were learning and whether they were learning what they needed for success in the education and then in their lives. We all have really ambitious aims for children, and what they might learn for their education. But one thing we do know and we know this, both through sort of logic and common sense, but also from research is that if children are less successful than we would like, in an aspect of their education, for example, GCSE, but they did not have the knowledge they needed to have the success in that area. And curriculum is a... curriculum means focusing on what it is that children need to learn step by step over time to have success in those ambitious curriculum aims or educational goals that we've got for them.
Chris Jones:
And so why do we have a curriculum unit in Ofsted, what does it do?
Heather Fearn:
Yeah, so we've we've really expanded the roles of our subject leads, so everything that has described there this emphasis on curriculum over a number of years now and of course, the introduction of the Education Inspection Framework, meant there's a there's a necessary opportunity to look at subjects too, and just consider what it means to get better at those subjects. So our subject leads have been appointed for every area of the curriculum and at the moment, they're working on two main things. So they're focused entirely on supporting our workforce, training them kind of day to day at conferences. And secondly, externally, just that work towards a subject report, a State of the Nation report, in each area of the curriculum, and we're, we're looking forward to sharing those next year.
Shreena Kotecha:
I'm interested in how does this interact with the national curriculum that all schools automatically follow?
Heather Fearn: 3:42
It's a really good question. It was one I was asked a lot actually when EIF was first launched. And if we think about the national curriculum, it has a set of quite high level goals that are outlined, it is quite a short document. That's one of the things that's most striking about it - very brief, and it's got a set of kind of what could be described as high level goals in each subject, a bit more detail for English and maths and not and really not very detailed across the other subjects. And that means that there's an awful lot of thinking that has to be done about what it is that children need to learn to get to the point where they are going to be successful in those high level goals.
We know that children have, that everyone makes sense of new things that they learn based on what they already know. And that basic insight about how we learn means that through children's education step by step, there should be a curriculum which leads them towards learning what they will need over time, and those steps are identified by schools, but those can be towards the high level goals of the national curriculum. And in Ofsted, our own framework criteria would expect schools even if they don't need to follow the national curriculum and the high level goals outlined there, to be thinking, designing an educational plan, which is at least as ambitious.
Chris Jones
I'm sure there's lots more that John and Heather can can say but I want to turn to Ruth and Steve now, Ruth, you've you've led curriculum working in schools and trusts - what what is it? What does it mean to you and have you what what's changed over the last few years if anything for you?
Ruth Ashbee:
I think one of the first sort of impacts that I personally felt was that I was able to be focusing on the things that I wanted to focus on, having read extensively around kind of, you know, how students learn and the importance of the subject specialisms, and that sort of thing. And, you know, I wasn't kind of compelled to be looking at some of the distractions that perhaps we felt under previous frameworks, or at least I did, and I think that that being able leaders and teachers to focus on the substance of what is taught in the high level goals and the components that can lead students to reach those high level goals is just such a wonderful thing for us to be focusing on as a profession because, you know, as I said, it allows those students to make those progress and all that those students and it helps us to reduce the the issue where students kind of come with less knowledge and they're less able to make progress and we have that kind of widening of the gap, but it's better for staff as well.
You know, it's just so wonderful to be able to engage with subject specialism and all these wonderful ways of looking at the world. I think that it's a really inspiring aspect of the profession now and I think we are so lucky to have that. The other thing as well that I think is important to say is we used to have this kind of mad dash towards year 11 At the end of the year, and having curriculum reflected in the inspection framework in terms of the judgement has allowed us to, you know, schools who have legacy issue around outcomes to be able to focus on implementing actions that you know, with our lowest year so in secondary school, beginning with your seventh, not just putting all your struggle teachers on your 11 for example, but doing work that's really important and valuable, but that doesn't show visibly in outcomes. So I think it's allowed us to do some of those things that perhaps take longer, but have more benefits over the longer term.
Chris Jones
Thanks. Steve, what do you think, what are your reflections on on the curriculum?
Steve Mastin:
I fully concur with what Ruth said and if I if I take it back even further to primary schools, I mean, I'm an historian and classicist by background and we know the Latin derivation of curriculum being a course or like a running track and there's a starting point to that and the way that you're in the middle of the race is different from the way the the very beginning of the race.
And I think what a curriculum is, is a set of promises that teachers at the beginning of the curriculum are making to teach us further into the curriculum. And if we just see the curriculum as a pile of stuff, like even if it's really good stuff that children are learning, but that stuff is not organised in any sort of coherent, sequenced way, then it would be like doing the Romans before you did the Greeks. It's very common in some primary schools, because if we see them as just bits and pieces, topics stuff that children learn, but there's no wrestling with, so why would you do the Greeks before the Romans? What will learning the Greeks first, enable children to access in a more sophisticated way when they study the Romans? And I would say the same thing in secondary. So I was a head of history for a number of years. And before I started working in primary schools, I've worked in hundreds of primary schools now across the country, I would say as a secondary school teacher in the sixth or the seventh Ofsted inspections that, can I use the word endured, in the six or seven inspections that I was subjected to, at no point before the 2019 framework, did the inspector ever ask to see my curriculum?
I was never really having a discussion about where this lesson fitted into the wider scheme - how the lesson before had enabled children to access the learning in this lesson. And so I think, I mean, it's revolutionary, is that too strong a word. I have heard so much positive feedback from schools about the deep dives, because if you are proud of your curriculum, if you've wrestled with not just the stuff that's in it, but the sequencing enabling children to access future learning, then a deep dive is such an exciting revolution.
Chris Jones
That's really good stuff. Thank you. And we're going to hear a bit later on from some colleagues who have recently been subjected to or have enjoyed, as you say, a deep dive and have got some things to tell us about how that felt and how that and how that went. I just need to say this difference between primary schools and secondary schools because we are we do here? The Ofsted framework is only designed for secondary schools if they're only working in primary schools because you know, it doesn't reflect how primary schools are organised. What do you say to that, Steve?
Steve Mastin:
I couldn't disagree more. I couldn't disagree more. I think the big difference, of course, is that in secondary schools, the person who is designing the curriculum via geography or history is a subject specialist, you would hope that they're a subject specialist, and so they wrestle with that curriculum over years and years, refining and reflecting on etc. And of course, primary school teachers have to be Leonardo da Vinci's, they have to be experts in every subject, and with the best will in the world. Primary School teachers want to be seen as experts when they're standing up in front of their children. But you can't be an expert in everything. And so when you have a history, lead or geography, lead or humanities lead in a primary school, that's a huge undertaking, if you don't feel that you're a subject specialist, and so, you draw upon the expertise of, of, let's say, your subject Association, the Historical Association or the other associations and you think, sir, how do I organise a curriculum because if I get the point, that it's more than just a pile of stuff, and the sequencing is the sequencing is crucial, then where do I go to draw upon advice? Where's my locus of authority for thinking about the curriculum? So I think the benefits to primary schools are, are even greater, in many ways, because after all, Key Stage two is the biggest key stage of a child's education.
Chris Jones:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And from a secondary lens. Ruth, you mentioned some of the some of the changes that the focus on curriculum has allowed you to make, but as it has not yet fed through into impacts on on learning, children are getting a different experience because of that.
Ruth Ashbee:
Knowledge is at the heart of it, isn't it? And I think that you need to have all that detailed knowledge and that awareness of sort of debates in the subject and the confidence to talk about it with adults can only you know, you can't fake it, can you so it's just a wonderful thing to say.
Chris Jones:
Though, there can be a sense whenever Ofsted changes its expectations. That's a that's an issue for schools but I know that we have been keen to to help school leaders and curriculum leaders navigate their way through this, this, this new landscape.
Heather Fearn: 12:04
And so over the last few years, we've been publishing a set, we've published a series of research reviews, we've only got two left to go. And they're available on gov.uk. And the purpose of these research reviews, when we go into schools, we want to make sure that we're thinking about what could be a quality of education in each subject. And the way we're thinking about that is the best it could be that we've got the best possible conception or way of thinking about quality. And that meant we wanted to have a look at what research there was. And what it suggested about what is a quality subject education.
Jonathan Keay:
We've thought carefully about how we can make these documents accessible to so it's worth knowing with those research reviews, that they're pretty accessible. Whether your primary or secondary there's a nice summary at the start. There are takeaways, it's nice and easy to read. You know the listeners might might want to know as well. We've got some YouTube videos out there as well. So they're really short. They summarise the research reviews and our subject just quickly and in kind of little as 15 minutes, give you the big big kind of ticket items about their subject. And there are more videos on the way soon as well.
Chris Jones:
I want to make sure that we don't give people the impression that this is all very easy and straightforward. Because, you know, curriculum planning and sequencing and getting a right thinking deeply about your subject is is is something that takes time and a great deal of effort, isn't it? And I'm sure Steve and Ruth you've both put in that effort yourselves and also you helped other people with that. We talked about some of the challenges of getting it right. When it comes to curriculum. Steve, I'll come to you first if you don't mind.
Steve Mastin:
Well, let me think of a school that I was in just recently and they were teaching a lesson about Alexander the Great. And Alexander's empire, how Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire. And for years the Persian Empire had been trying to take the Greek city states into their empire. Well, just that that that sentence that I just said there, the amount of sophisticated knowledge that it takes just to understand that sentence - and these teachers in Enfield they weren't giving children a definition of the word Empire as if you learn the word Empire by memorising a definition of it. It's thinking where is the first time that children in year three encounter the concept of empire? And how do we teach that because we know that in two units time when they've done the Persian Empire, and they've done the Greek city states and the Persian Greek wars, when they get to Alexander, that word Empire is going to take on another meaning so that when they get to year four, and they're looking at the Roman Empire, we don't have to teach the Roman Empire we don't have to teach the word empire. We're simply layering with further knowledge and - look at well, isn't this interesting for this empire has someone called an Emperor now that takes planning doesn't it - you don't accidentally meander your way into into or look at what we're able to do now because of what we did in year three. When it comes to thinking long term about the curriculum. It's not something I would want a school to rush as if suddenly you import these documents and suddenly you've got a fantastically well sequenced curriculum - doesn't always work that way.
Chris Jones:
It's fascinating, isn't it? And here, I can see how curriculum experts such as yourself, who spent hours poring over the details of how this all of ours will fits together. And Ruth, I imagine it's, it's a messy, rewarding, as well as challenging to be thinking and this depth about the curriculum as you are.
Ruth Ashbee:
Yeah, definitely. I think in terms of the challenges that schools face, I think the first challenge that many many schools face is just - behaviour. And you know, if you don't have high, high functioning systems for behaviour, so the teachers are able to have high expectations then you can have the best curriculum in the world, but it won't have the impact that you want it to do and also what you have is teachers sort of feeling under pressure to distort the curriculum or distort how they're going to teach the children because you know, all this will engage them. It's best to have a practical on Friday last period by because otherwise they won't listen and that's really damaging. The headline from what you've just said, Steve, is that curriculum is just massive, isn't it? Like it's such a huge job, just just to think about the sequencing is a huge job and to get staff to a place where they where they have all the tools to begin to think about that huge job.
You're often in a massive sort of chicken and egg scenario where you want people to kind of be learning a lot about cognition, the role of memory and long term memory and short term memory and so on, but you want people to be engaging with the subject networks, but you don't want to overwhelm people and you've got parents evening just tonight and you know, all the kind of realities of, of day to day life in a school. But I do think you know, that if we're not careful, we tend to sort of admit that knowledge building for teachers and we sort of rushed towards a click for that this template or like, what's your curriculum map, do retrieval practice or how you can make sure that you're providing for people to attend and, and actually, you know, people will fill out those things dutifully, because they're conscientious, but if we're not feeding that knowledge by as Steve says, you know, engagement with the subject networks and so on the real sort of the benefits of focusing on curriculum.
Steve Mastin:
yeah, I think you also have pressures on senior leaders in schools. If you're a head of department, and your line manager is a very good line manager but he or she is not a subject specialist in your subject. How can senior leaders support curriculum leaders in secondary schools? And I would say one of the most obvious things that a line manager can do is to use some of that language of so can you talk me through - why do you teach this in the autumn term of year eight? What does it build on? And where is it going to be useful in freeing up working memory later on for children to be able to access something more sophisticated? Can you talk me through that? Now, you don't have to be a subject specialist to ask that question, whether it's in music or science or whatever. But if a subject leader can't answer that question, then I would say you're a good line manager by starting them in the direction well, that's how the curriculum works, doesn't it? It's not a pile of stuff. It builds on what we've done before and it enables children to access future learning.
Shreena Kotecha:
I'm interested in how you came about sort of tweaking and refining the curriculum once you've developed it. So how do you spot when something isn't going well and could go better? And how do you build a culture where teachers feel kind of empowered to to fess up when something isn't doing so? Well?
Ruth Ashbee:
Yeah, I mean, culture is an enormous art of making it work. And I think that's something that we can't wave a magic wand, but that's just something that we build, like with our day to day interactions, but also with sort of systems and structures that we have in the school things like do we have high stakes lesson observations? For example? Do we have unwieldy evidence for performance management because all of those things contribute to a sort of sense that if this isn't working, then I'm going to look bad? So I'm just gonna keep quiet. And you know, we need to think about that kind of that big picture.
And I think the more time that teachers can spend together talking evaluating just in that normal, you know, that kind of staff room sort of - there was a blog a while ago by Michael Fordham about a brown sofa in the history department office. And it was just so evocative that just the sort of the conversations that they would just have as part as a team sort of every day, actually, as leaders, we can create the time for those conversations by just freeing up department time.
Steve Mastin:
I think if senior leaders are creating a culture in their schools, which encourages departments to have conversations around the curriculum, I think of heads of department that I know in schools where they have the freedom to be able to say we're not going to do admin if we can help with in department meetings. What I'm going to do as a head of department, is I'm going to send out an article for the people in my department to read. I'm not going to expect them to do it before the meeting because they've got lots of other things going on. We're going to spend the first 15 minutes of my department meeting reading the same article about curriculum or perhaps a particular area of the curriculum. So maybe something that a historian has recently written or listening to a podcast for 15 minutes together, and then have a discussion about so how would this influence our curriculum? What does that make us reflect on? Are we teaching this with the latest scholarship bearing down on us? How do we reflect on the way in which that particular aspect of year nine relates to this in year seven because of what we've just read, and senior leaders are making time for that culture to be celebrated rather than being seen as a luxury or an indulgence? Decadent to do something like that? If people are listening to what I just said, and thinking, gosh, that's a bit decadent, well, then we're thinking about the wrong things when it comes to curriculum.
Chris Jones:
It strikes me from what you both said that, clearly the the evolution of a curriculum is likely to happen over time. It's likely to involve your discussion and thought, practice and assessment and, and so on. And, Heather, I want to come back to the Ofsted angle on this so and talk a bit about what what are our expectations for what we'll see on an inspection you know, how do we are we expecting perfection here? Or in fact to do it? Are we able to recognise that as I've said, these things do do take a bit of time to get to where people might want them to get to?
Heather Fearn:
The really most crucial thing in education is that pupils are learning what they need to so that they can achieve the ambitious goals that we've got for them from their education. On inspection, when we're not looking for any particular paperwork or complicated planning system or codes or endless sorts of different files with different things in different things. What we want to look at is, are these pupils learning what they need to step by step that means that they are going to be successful? And so that means just just looking at your curriculum plans and seeing and talking through them with you. We don't have any special view of what plans might look like or any expectation with that regard, but talking to you about what your planning is, and whether that plan has identified what pupils need to learn step by step towards those ambitious goals that you have for your pupils.
Chris Jones:
And we just know it's a particular challenge for primary schools and small programmes in particular, just to reassure you, you know, as a Jonathan said, do keep it simple. both Steve and Ruth have said some things that are just really useful to hang your conversations on. And it's all about coherence. Can you describe the journey that your pupils go on in terms of how they get better at those different subjects? And those are the questions kind of why this why now and how is what they're learning preparing for what's going to come in the future and how is what they have learned, prepared them for where they are now?
Heather Fearn:
When we go and listen on visits, we're not judging the teachers and we're not judging lessons, but we are thinking about whether those pupils learning what they're learning now have been set up and prepared for that lesson now by what's gone before and yeah, are they actually learning it now? Has it been learned? Have they remembered the things they need to for the lesson they're in now?
Chris Jones:
Every time we have these conversations about curriculum, which has been quite a lot over the last few few years, I'm always taken back to my time at school, and the sharp contrast between those lessons in which I felt confident and those lessons in which I felt all at sea and you know, thinking about it, now it's quite clear where I felt confident and I felt motivated and I felt like I'd achieved is because of the things that we're talking about. I could remember what happened in the previous lesson or set of lessons and I was presented with something to build that upon and to take it on to the next level and those where, I felt all at sea, demoralised and, frankly a bit upset, was when I was given a task with no background information, no explanation, nothing to build it on and just told to get to get on with it. And I think that's the that that is the impact of a good curriculum versus a weaker curriculum on the children, the class of children.
Jonathan keay:
That's the most simple, most important curriculum planning. I want to be here by the end of this sequence of lessons. What do I want my pupils to have learned? And then next question, what activities are most likely to ensure they would learn that and that granularity and detail you haven't got to start from scratch? Now think back to my time as a teacher and a head teacher, you know, we adopted schemes we made use of what other local schools were doing, and just made it work in our context. So don't feel you've got to start from scratch. There's plenty of stuff out there.
Steve Mastin:
It's very popular now in schools to use what's commonly called retrieval practice. But yet retrieval practice is misunderstood in some schools, with some people thinking that if we do retrieval practice, which amounts in some schools to not much more than just some random quizzing at the start of a lesson, that that's what the Ofsted inspector wants to see. But of course, what is it that you're retrieving? And why is a more important question than do you do retrieval practice? So getting back to what Heather was saying that we're not wanting to see in lessons, all singing, all dancing, wizzy, kids up all over the place, having a really fun time. You know, the throwing the kitchen sink at a lesson because you know, it's being inspected? It's the opposite. It's isn't obvious when you're doing retrieval practice, that these are the things you want children to remember. And these are the reasons why to remember those things because those things that you're retrieving are going to be useful in this lesson and in future lessons, rather than just quizzing for the sake of quizzing.
Chris Jones:
Very helpful. Thank you. I want to take a minute for the hard-pressed classroom teacher in a primary school, they might be it might have been given a subject or more than one subject to lead. They're largely trying to trying to survive day to day in some cases, with planning and delivering lessons and marketing books and so on. What can we say to people about why this is a really important investment of of time and what can we say to school leaders about your why, why this this type of planning should be should be prioritised above some of those other activities.
Jonathan Keay:
How simple can we make this? I guess? Pupils deserve to have things to think with and that's, that's what makes it possible to do all of the hard stuff in life. And actually, if they're not given those opportunities to learn that knowledge, then then far less likely to be able to do some of the complex tasks, perhaps in relation to exams, but nevermind that just the things day to day, their opportunity to take part in conversations that they might not normally be able to.
Chris Jones
Ruth, what do you think?
Ruth Ashbee:
Well, I'd just like to push back slightly on the first part of your question there, Chris, because, you know, if teachers are struggling to survive, then I think that our job as leaders must be to first of all ask, why is it that they're struggling to survive and what can we take away or what can we do differently so that they're so that they have capacity to focus on something as important as curriculum? I don't feel we should be going unnoticed, that isn't what you meant, but it's not a case of, you know, dig deep because this is really, really valuable. It's like, actually, do we need to be marking books or can we be using whole class feedback or responsive teaching? How many hours does it actually take to do this? You know, it's only CPD, we can sort of speed things up or streamline things or, you know, what can we do as a school that is the climate that teachers need in order to be able to, you know, fully engage with curriculum thinking and then once you get that, you know, it does become very addictive as well. You know, I'm not saying, you won't get teachers who are kind of go to conferences on the weekend and reading around that subject in their spare time as well. And that's wonderful. And, you know, we're very lucky that there are lots of people who do end up wanting to do that in our profession, but like, that can't be the expectation, teachers have got to be able to do a really good job of engaging in curriculum. Just as part of the normal working week.
Shreena Kotecha:
So can we talk a bit about how different subjects are dealt with differently? So how, for example, a science curriculum which enables if you have more expertise, and the humanities curriculum, which I see we have more expertise on, might be developed differently, but can we also talk a little bit about to what extent there should be or can be overlap between tea?
Heather Fearn:
Yeah, I think there's there's quite a few things that it's important to understand about science curriculum. Firstly, obviously, we've got three sciences physics, chemistry and biology. The way that it's examined is very yes, no, right or wrong answers, but that impacts a lot on the type of practice that we ought to be getting students to do. There's, you know, it's a hugely broad and wide discipline and students have to remember an awful lot. I think you still get sort of some residual thinking about kind of you know, maybe Bloom's taxonomy or sort of literacy activities and you get sort of spurious, debates introduced or evaluations introduced, sometimes that sort of go against the nature of the subject, you know, that there are certain elements of it where it overlaps with kind of ethics or broken society and so on. But by and large, it's about factual claims, explaining the natural world and making predictions about what will happen in the natural world. So it's important to recognise that when we are defining the sorts of quality practice that we'd expect students to be doing in sesson to learn that material.
Chris Jones:
And Steve, what how does that differ? Or does it differ in history and humanities?
Steve Mastin:
It's foundational to any curriculum to think of that, not just in terms of the substantive knowledge, the what that children are learning and the order in which they're learning it? But but also that disciplinary knowledge, and that's where line managers in secondary schools can allow their subject specialist head of whatever to think about the discipline, how it works. So for example, in geography, geographers think about the sense of place in a very specific way and when they talk about place, they don't mean location, location is where you can see where somewhere is, by its coordinates, but a sense of place is all to do with so how do the people who live in that place understand that place and how do they talk about their sense of place? And I as a geography teacher, let's say teaching about the Amazon, I'm going to represent the Amazon to children, but that's not necessarily how the Amazon is. So it gets quite complex. But of course, that's why you need geography specialists to be able to understand how you teach children to describe a sense of place. Likewise, in history, we ask questions about causes and consequences and change and continuity and similarity and difference, but you wouldn't want to see let's say in a in a primary history lesson, children's saying, 'So do you like this period of history? What do you think of the Vikings? Would you rather live at the time of the Vikings all the time of the Romans?' So we've suddenly stepped outside the discipline of history, and we're now asking children to, you know, give their opinions and there's nothing wrong with asking open ended questions, but they must be within the discipline, whether it's history or geography, not just engaging, fun questions, because as soon as we step outside, that discipline, then that curricular thinking thinking like historians or like geographers, is not being modelled and it's not being taught.
Jonathan Keay:
It's really useful to hear Ruth and Steve, using much of the language as well that you'll you'll find in our research reviews if you read them and that's really helpful to hear how these kind of things are washing up in the education community as well. Of course, colleagues use these terms all the time, but hopefully, the way they've described both of their subjects, there is another gateway into some of our work in the curriculum unit as well.
Steve Mastin:
It's great to just give one example, I think Shreena was talking about it, where you have connections between subjects, but not because you've shoehorned them in as if cross curricular clarity is the big goal, but where they naturally occur. So going back to that school in Enfield that I was visiting, I was sitting next to one of the schools ministers over the last year. And up on the board in this year for history lesson was a sentence that said 'Judea was a province in the east of the Roman Empire'. And the teacher wasn't teaching that, the teacher was then building new knowledge on that. And I turned to the school's minister and I said, how much sophisticated knowledge in history and geography is required just to understand that sentence? And do you notice the teacher didn't teach any of it? Because the children are coming to this lesson with that secure geographical knowledge so they know where to look on the map to find East. That's a simple example. But where geography and history naturally overlap. Then, of course, those connections should be made clear to pupils, but I think shoehorning them in ends up doing a disservice to both subjects.
Heather Fearn:
A separate but distinct point about subject differences, I think really was highlighted during the pandemic. And with the kind of urgency of catch up because it's very easy to have sort of homeschool messages about what catch up should be identify gaps. Intervene might be a kind of set of standard instructions when thinking about catch up, and that might work for maths. For example, or it might work for phonics, where the subject knowledge is kind of relatively hierarchical, you build on the next thing and then you find out for some children, you've got some gaps and you fill them in. Whereas for subjects like history and geography in subjects where Steve does more work, it might be that during the pandemic pupils simply didn't do the Vikings at all the instruction identify gaps Well, they didn't do the Vikings that's the gap assess the gaps or dentist because you know, they didn't do the Vikings. And another instruction might be make curriculum alterations, and actually that flips things because you don't want to make curriculum alterations in math, so you decide to skip fractions or in phonics you described you decide to skip the letter sound 'Mmm', because it's non negotiable, it's got to be covered and it's got to be learned. Whereas in history and geography and and subjects of that sort it might be possible to make curriculum alterations to sort of emphasise what might be most crucial to be able to keep going.
[music]
Chris Jones:
We spoke to Felicity Haresign, maths lead, and Kenneth Davis, the head teacher of Cliddesden Primary School in Basingstoke about their deep dive with Dan Lambert, Ofsted HMI, schools, and Kathryn Moles from the Education Policy Team here at Ofsted.
Dan Lambert:
Thanks very much, Chris. My name is Dan Lambert. I'm one of His Majesty's inspectors, and I'm really pleased to be joined today by Kathryn Moles, who is a specialist advisor in Ofsted's policy quality and training and more importantly, we're really pleased to be joined by Ken and Felicity. Ken is the head teacher at Cliddesden primary school and Felicity is their maths lead. And Felicity it was great pleasure of mine to inspect your school in November 2021. In terms of the deep dives, how did they feel and what did they involve?
Kenneth Davies:
Well, we knew from our phone call with you the day before Dan which was very useful, which subjects were going to be the focus for the inspection, obviously reading, which is what's happening in all schools, and we looked at mathematics as well and then we discussed the subjects that we felt was our strength, but I also got the chance to talk to you Dan, about the curriculum in general. And Felicity is our maths lead. I'm going to hand over to her to talk about her experience with the data.
Felicity Haresign:
When you have the Ofsted call, you are nervous, and I don't think you can change that feeling. But after the day, it was an intense day and it was full on but I came out with a positive feeling, everyone was really friendly. From the beginning Dan you joked about someone's laptop, not working on the day and my laptop works every single day, but that morning had decided not to. But that made me feel a bit more relaxed and it was it was both friendly and it wasn't threatening at all. I had to have a meeting and a chat about math as my subject, we talked about how maths is throughout the school, what the assessment is, like, how I planned it, where the progression is, and due to joining the maths hub several years ago we are working alongside it. So I'm quite confident and I was quite confident with how we set out our curriculum. So in terms of preparing for that, there wasn't so much to prepare for as we had done quite a lot of work over the past few years.
Kathryn Moles:
Nice good question, Felicity. And Ken, you both talked about feeling well prepared for the inspection and the subject deep dive and you've talked about the work you've done with your staff around that. Just explain to me what it's about preparing to understand what a deep dive looked like or - was it about preparing in terms of just being really clear about your subject and the kind of the way your subject was set up and what you were trying to achieve from it or a bit of both?
Kenneth Davies:
I think mainly it was about our curriculum really, being prepared. I mean, we I remember pre pandemic going to a conference and Ofsted conference at St. Mary's in Southampton, about what a curriculum should look like. Well, the quality of the curriculum is in terms of children should be acquiring knowledge. So it wasn't just about you know, Ofsted mean it's about getting the best for the children and making sure we are doing what we should be doing. So I think that that's what we mean in terms of preparation. It took time to evolve is still evolving a year after our inspection. I think in terms of being ready for the inspection as well. Obviously we wanted to showcase what we've done. So we didn't want inspectors coming in and teachers and subject leaders not really being able to talk about their subjects or or finding gaps in things, we wanted them to be prepared to to showcase what they've done and to be confident. And the same with the children as well, because we knew inspectors were going to talk to children's but after deep dives, and so you know, checking with children we're familiar with what they learn in be able to be able to talk about their learning in a confident way.
Felicity Haresign:
So preparing for me was more preparing to be able to talk about my subject. I know I'm an expert in my subject. I've worked really hard on it, but being able to articulate to somebody else what I've done and how it works in this school has been freshly built from early years to year six, which we thought carefully about, how we set out our assessments that teachers can really see where the children are, where their gaps are, and it was being able to talk about that confidently. We discussed deep dives in staff meetings which really helped us to be clear on what we wanted to share with the inspector.
Dan Lambert:
Thanks Felicity, it sounds like you're really well prepared and from memory, you absolutely were. I've got a question - in that initial discussion with inspectors, did you feel that you were able to really describe and give inspectors a really clear picture of your subject and what they should expect to see during the day?
Felicity Haresign:
During my subject leave chat with the inspector, she asked most of the questions that I was expecting, most of the things that we have been through during the staff meeting. And over the last year, I had a teacher assessment sheet that worked alongside our maths curriculum. So I was quite proud of that to show the inspector and she was willing to look at the assessment.
Dan Lambert:
Thanks so much Felicity, that was really interesting and great to hear. After those initial discussions with inspectors, you will have started to complete some lesson visits. Talking to pupils inspectors would have also looked at people's work as well. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Kenneth Davies:
So I was lucky enough to join the inspector on visiting classrooms to look at mathematics across the school ranging from year six down to the early years. I also was able to join my English lead in our discussion with the inspector about phonics and reading. And then I know the inspectors have the opportunity to talk to the children about their subjects, hear children read and also talk to them about other aspects of their learning school
Kathryn Moles:
And you are a small school as well and having two inspectors on site for one day working with with colleagues in the school can be a challenge. How did you manage that?
Kenneth Davies:
It was a challenge ensuring that my subject leads felt confident that they could speak to inspectors on their own or whether they wanted a senior leader and again, senior management in small schools is very small. Well, I I kind of look at everyone as being a leader in my school to be honest, but whether they wanted someone to join them, and we made sure that there was an opportunity to do that with our our very, very efficient, capable LSAS covering if needed to when when they were speaking to inspectors.
Dan Lambert:
So Ken, it's interesting hearing you talking about your involvement in the deep dives because often in some schools you can find that head teachers feel quite removed from the deep dive process because it's all being carried out in conjunction with their subject leaders or those people responsible for subjects. So it sounds like that wasn't the case for you. It sounds like you were quite involved in what was going on.
Kenneth Davies:
Yes, I did. I did. I think the initial phone call the day before also help because it gave me the opportunity to discuss things with with them like to say because we're a small school I did join join for the English discussion. And also I got the opportunity in the afternoon to speak to Dan about the other subjects that we hadn't deep dived into, we looked at a bit about geography and design and technology as I recall and some of the children's work, in particular how we were moving forward in working out how we can assess these subjects or what they're more importantly, what we're assessing in those subjects areas. I was just as busy as everybody else and didn't feel disconnected at all. But also I think part of the role of the head teacher is to make sure the well being of all your staff and to make sure everyone's feeling good and relaxed and willing to participate the best they can.
Dan Lambert:
Good to hear. That's exactly how we want it. This is a bit of a rare privilege for me because I never get to see the same people twice when I've inspected them so I'm gonna seize the opportunity if I might. Obviously we talked about areas for improvement what was working really well in the school and you can build on further and a few areas that need to address. It's a good year on now. So how is the school changed?
Kenneth Davies:
One of the areas that was identified was making sure that there was consistency in subjects all the way from foundation stage to year six. We revisited in particularly our geography curriculum, well the largest gap was to ensure that there was progression, things weren't repeated unnecessarily. We've also worked on on our assessment techniques, we are very much in the position that with the foundation subjects and wider curriculum that we don't want to be producing some check sheets, it's more about the teacher assessment and getting the children to be able to, you know, be able to talk about what they've learned and maybe you know, a few little quizzes involved things like that, but also that they are acquiring that knowledge and but also acquiring the skills needed. That you need to be a good historian and a good geographer, a good technician, and those things are constantly constantly evolving. We have not sat back on our laurels.
Dan Lambert:
Fantastic to hear it sounds like it's been an incredibly busy year for you. It's been really, really great talking to everyone. Thanks Kathryn for joining us, and in particular thanks Ken and Felicity for spending your time today telling us about your experience of inspection. We wish we wish you all the best of luck for the year ahead.
Ends.
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By OfstedWe talk to Ofsted's curriculum unit, teachers who've been involved in curriculum planning and a Head and subject lead who've recently been inspected about the deep dives they experienced.
Chris Jones
Hi everybody and welcome to the latest episode of Ofsted Talks, the Ofsted podcast. Today's subject is the curriculum. I'd like to introduce my new co-host Shreena Kotecha. Hi Shreena.
Shreena Kotecha: Hi Chris.
Chris Jones: Very nice to have you with us. I've also got some fantastic guests today. I've got Heather Fearn and Jonathan Keay from Ofsted's curriculum unit. Do you want to say hi, hello. Hi both. And I also have fantastic school leaders to help us talk about the thorny subject of the curriculum. I'm gonna let them introduce themselves. I've got Ruth Ashbee, Ruth...
Ruth Ashbee
Hi, Chris. Hi, everyone. I'm Ruth Ashbee. I'm a senior deputy head at Holly Lodge High School in Smethwick in the West Midlands and also vice chair of governors at Millbrae school where I live in Shrewsbury.
Chris Jones
Excellent thank you, Ruth, and we also have Steve Mastin. Hi, Steve.
Steve Mastin
Hi, everyone. My name is Steve Mastin. I was a secondary school head of history for last 17 years.
Chris Jones
Excellent. Welcome, Steve. Welcome, Ruth. And thanks very much to Jonathan and Heather for joining us as well.
Shreena Kotecha:
Jonathan and Heather, do you want to start just by kind of telling us in a nutshell, what is the curriculum and why should we care?
Heather Fearn:
Focus on curriculum is the focus on what it is that pupils learn what chiefest spectacles the substance of education? So I think for quite a long time in schools there's been a focus when thinking about what was quality teaching on what perhaps what teaching methods were used, whether there were particular ways of teaching different sorts of activities, which would be considered more or less effective than others. And that had meant there wasn't as much emphasis on what it was that pupils were learning and whether they were learning what they needed for success in the education and then in their lives. We all have really ambitious aims for children, and what they might learn for their education. But one thing we do know and we know this, both through sort of logic and common sense, but also from research is that if children are less successful than we would like, in an aspect of their education, for example, GCSE, but they did not have the knowledge they needed to have the success in that area. And curriculum is a... curriculum means focusing on what it is that children need to learn step by step over time to have success in those ambitious curriculum aims or educational goals that we've got for them.
Chris Jones:
And so why do we have a curriculum unit in Ofsted, what does it do?
Heather Fearn:
Yeah, so we've we've really expanded the roles of our subject leads, so everything that has described there this emphasis on curriculum over a number of years now and of course, the introduction of the Education Inspection Framework, meant there's a there's a necessary opportunity to look at subjects too, and just consider what it means to get better at those subjects. So our subject leads have been appointed for every area of the curriculum and at the moment, they're working on two main things. So they're focused entirely on supporting our workforce, training them kind of day to day at conferences. And secondly, externally, just that work towards a subject report, a State of the Nation report, in each area of the curriculum, and we're, we're looking forward to sharing those next year.
Shreena Kotecha:
I'm interested in how does this interact with the national curriculum that all schools automatically follow?
Heather Fearn: 3:42
It's a really good question. It was one I was asked a lot actually when EIF was first launched. And if we think about the national curriculum, it has a set of quite high level goals that are outlined, it is quite a short document. That's one of the things that's most striking about it - very brief, and it's got a set of kind of what could be described as high level goals in each subject, a bit more detail for English and maths and not and really not very detailed across the other subjects. And that means that there's an awful lot of thinking that has to be done about what it is that children need to learn to get to the point where they are going to be successful in those high level goals.
We know that children have, that everyone makes sense of new things that they learn based on what they already know. And that basic insight about how we learn means that through children's education step by step, there should be a curriculum which leads them towards learning what they will need over time, and those steps are identified by schools, but those can be towards the high level goals of the national curriculum. And in Ofsted, our own framework criteria would expect schools even if they don't need to follow the national curriculum and the high level goals outlined there, to be thinking, designing an educational plan, which is at least as ambitious.
Chris Jones
I'm sure there's lots more that John and Heather can can say but I want to turn to Ruth and Steve now, Ruth, you've you've led curriculum working in schools and trusts - what what is it? What does it mean to you and have you what what's changed over the last few years if anything for you?
Ruth Ashbee:
I think one of the first sort of impacts that I personally felt was that I was able to be focusing on the things that I wanted to focus on, having read extensively around kind of, you know, how students learn and the importance of the subject specialisms, and that sort of thing. And, you know, I wasn't kind of compelled to be looking at some of the distractions that perhaps we felt under previous frameworks, or at least I did, and I think that that being able leaders and teachers to focus on the substance of what is taught in the high level goals and the components that can lead students to reach those high level goals is just such a wonderful thing for us to be focusing on as a profession because, you know, as I said, it allows those students to make those progress and all that those students and it helps us to reduce the the issue where students kind of come with less knowledge and they're less able to make progress and we have that kind of widening of the gap, but it's better for staff as well.
You know, it's just so wonderful to be able to engage with subject specialism and all these wonderful ways of looking at the world. I think that it's a really inspiring aspect of the profession now and I think we are so lucky to have that. The other thing as well that I think is important to say is we used to have this kind of mad dash towards year 11 At the end of the year, and having curriculum reflected in the inspection framework in terms of the judgement has allowed us to, you know, schools who have legacy issue around outcomes to be able to focus on implementing actions that you know, with our lowest year so in secondary school, beginning with your seventh, not just putting all your struggle teachers on your 11 for example, but doing work that's really important and valuable, but that doesn't show visibly in outcomes. So I think it's allowed us to do some of those things that perhaps take longer, but have more benefits over the longer term.
Chris Jones
Thanks. Steve, what do you think, what are your reflections on on the curriculum?
Steve Mastin:
I fully concur with what Ruth said and if I if I take it back even further to primary schools, I mean, I'm an historian and classicist by background and we know the Latin derivation of curriculum being a course or like a running track and there's a starting point to that and the way that you're in the middle of the race is different from the way the the very beginning of the race.
And I think what a curriculum is, is a set of promises that teachers at the beginning of the curriculum are making to teach us further into the curriculum. And if we just see the curriculum as a pile of stuff, like even if it's really good stuff that children are learning, but that stuff is not organised in any sort of coherent, sequenced way, then it would be like doing the Romans before you did the Greeks. It's very common in some primary schools, because if we see them as just bits and pieces, topics stuff that children learn, but there's no wrestling with, so why would you do the Greeks before the Romans? What will learning the Greeks first, enable children to access in a more sophisticated way when they study the Romans? And I would say the same thing in secondary. So I was a head of history for a number of years. And before I started working in primary schools, I've worked in hundreds of primary schools now across the country, I would say as a secondary school teacher in the sixth or the seventh Ofsted inspections that, can I use the word endured, in the six or seven inspections that I was subjected to, at no point before the 2019 framework, did the inspector ever ask to see my curriculum?
I was never really having a discussion about where this lesson fitted into the wider scheme - how the lesson before had enabled children to access the learning in this lesson. And so I think, I mean, it's revolutionary, is that too strong a word. I have heard so much positive feedback from schools about the deep dives, because if you are proud of your curriculum, if you've wrestled with not just the stuff that's in it, but the sequencing enabling children to access future learning, then a deep dive is such an exciting revolution.
Chris Jones
That's really good stuff. Thank you. And we're going to hear a bit later on from some colleagues who have recently been subjected to or have enjoyed, as you say, a deep dive and have got some things to tell us about how that felt and how that and how that went. I just need to say this difference between primary schools and secondary schools because we are we do here? The Ofsted framework is only designed for secondary schools if they're only working in primary schools because you know, it doesn't reflect how primary schools are organised. What do you say to that, Steve?
Steve Mastin:
I couldn't disagree more. I couldn't disagree more. I think the big difference, of course, is that in secondary schools, the person who is designing the curriculum via geography or history is a subject specialist, you would hope that they're a subject specialist, and so they wrestle with that curriculum over years and years, refining and reflecting on etc. And of course, primary school teachers have to be Leonardo da Vinci's, they have to be experts in every subject, and with the best will in the world. Primary School teachers want to be seen as experts when they're standing up in front of their children. But you can't be an expert in everything. And so when you have a history, lead or geography, lead or humanities lead in a primary school, that's a huge undertaking, if you don't feel that you're a subject specialist, and so, you draw upon the expertise of, of, let's say, your subject Association, the Historical Association or the other associations and you think, sir, how do I organise a curriculum because if I get the point, that it's more than just a pile of stuff, and the sequencing is the sequencing is crucial, then where do I go to draw upon advice? Where's my locus of authority for thinking about the curriculum? So I think the benefits to primary schools are, are even greater, in many ways, because after all, Key Stage two is the biggest key stage of a child's education.
Chris Jones:
Absolutely. Absolutely. And from a secondary lens. Ruth, you mentioned some of the some of the changes that the focus on curriculum has allowed you to make, but as it has not yet fed through into impacts on on learning, children are getting a different experience because of that.
Ruth Ashbee:
Knowledge is at the heart of it, isn't it? And I think that you need to have all that detailed knowledge and that awareness of sort of debates in the subject and the confidence to talk about it with adults can only you know, you can't fake it, can you so it's just a wonderful thing to say.
Chris Jones:
Though, there can be a sense whenever Ofsted changes its expectations. That's a that's an issue for schools but I know that we have been keen to to help school leaders and curriculum leaders navigate their way through this, this, this new landscape.
Heather Fearn: 12:04
And so over the last few years, we've been publishing a set, we've published a series of research reviews, we've only got two left to go. And they're available on gov.uk. And the purpose of these research reviews, when we go into schools, we want to make sure that we're thinking about what could be a quality of education in each subject. And the way we're thinking about that is the best it could be that we've got the best possible conception or way of thinking about quality. And that meant we wanted to have a look at what research there was. And what it suggested about what is a quality subject education.
Jonathan Keay:
We've thought carefully about how we can make these documents accessible to so it's worth knowing with those research reviews, that they're pretty accessible. Whether your primary or secondary there's a nice summary at the start. There are takeaways, it's nice and easy to read. You know the listeners might might want to know as well. We've got some YouTube videos out there as well. So they're really short. They summarise the research reviews and our subject just quickly and in kind of little as 15 minutes, give you the big big kind of ticket items about their subject. And there are more videos on the way soon as well.
Chris Jones:
I want to make sure that we don't give people the impression that this is all very easy and straightforward. Because, you know, curriculum planning and sequencing and getting a right thinking deeply about your subject is is is something that takes time and a great deal of effort, isn't it? And I'm sure Steve and Ruth you've both put in that effort yourselves and also you helped other people with that. We talked about some of the challenges of getting it right. When it comes to curriculum. Steve, I'll come to you first if you don't mind.
Steve Mastin:
Well, let me think of a school that I was in just recently and they were teaching a lesson about Alexander the Great. And Alexander's empire, how Alexander had conquered the Persian Empire. And for years the Persian Empire had been trying to take the Greek city states into their empire. Well, just that that that sentence that I just said there, the amount of sophisticated knowledge that it takes just to understand that sentence - and these teachers in Enfield they weren't giving children a definition of the word Empire as if you learn the word Empire by memorising a definition of it. It's thinking where is the first time that children in year three encounter the concept of empire? And how do we teach that because we know that in two units time when they've done the Persian Empire, and they've done the Greek city states and the Persian Greek wars, when they get to Alexander, that word Empire is going to take on another meaning so that when they get to year four, and they're looking at the Roman Empire, we don't have to teach the Roman Empire we don't have to teach the word empire. We're simply layering with further knowledge and - look at well, isn't this interesting for this empire has someone called an Emperor now that takes planning doesn't it - you don't accidentally meander your way into into or look at what we're able to do now because of what we did in year three. When it comes to thinking long term about the curriculum. It's not something I would want a school to rush as if suddenly you import these documents and suddenly you've got a fantastically well sequenced curriculum - doesn't always work that way.
Chris Jones:
It's fascinating, isn't it? And here, I can see how curriculum experts such as yourself, who spent hours poring over the details of how this all of ours will fits together. And Ruth, I imagine it's, it's a messy, rewarding, as well as challenging to be thinking and this depth about the curriculum as you are.
Ruth Ashbee:
Yeah, definitely. I think in terms of the challenges that schools face, I think the first challenge that many many schools face is just - behaviour. And you know, if you don't have high, high functioning systems for behaviour, so the teachers are able to have high expectations then you can have the best curriculum in the world, but it won't have the impact that you want it to do and also what you have is teachers sort of feeling under pressure to distort the curriculum or distort how they're going to teach the children because you know, all this will engage them. It's best to have a practical on Friday last period by because otherwise they won't listen and that's really damaging. The headline from what you've just said, Steve, is that curriculum is just massive, isn't it? Like it's such a huge job, just just to think about the sequencing is a huge job and to get staff to a place where they where they have all the tools to begin to think about that huge job.
You're often in a massive sort of chicken and egg scenario where you want people to kind of be learning a lot about cognition, the role of memory and long term memory and short term memory and so on, but you want people to be engaging with the subject networks, but you don't want to overwhelm people and you've got parents evening just tonight and you know, all the kind of realities of, of day to day life in a school. But I do think you know, that if we're not careful, we tend to sort of admit that knowledge building for teachers and we sort of rushed towards a click for that this template or like, what's your curriculum map, do retrieval practice or how you can make sure that you're providing for people to attend and, and actually, you know, people will fill out those things dutifully, because they're conscientious, but if we're not feeding that knowledge by as Steve says, you know, engagement with the subject networks and so on the real sort of the benefits of focusing on curriculum.
Steve Mastin:
yeah, I think you also have pressures on senior leaders in schools. If you're a head of department, and your line manager is a very good line manager but he or she is not a subject specialist in your subject. How can senior leaders support curriculum leaders in secondary schools? And I would say one of the most obvious things that a line manager can do is to use some of that language of so can you talk me through - why do you teach this in the autumn term of year eight? What does it build on? And where is it going to be useful in freeing up working memory later on for children to be able to access something more sophisticated? Can you talk me through that? Now, you don't have to be a subject specialist to ask that question, whether it's in music or science or whatever. But if a subject leader can't answer that question, then I would say you're a good line manager by starting them in the direction well, that's how the curriculum works, doesn't it? It's not a pile of stuff. It builds on what we've done before and it enables children to access future learning.
Shreena Kotecha:
I'm interested in how you came about sort of tweaking and refining the curriculum once you've developed it. So how do you spot when something isn't going well and could go better? And how do you build a culture where teachers feel kind of empowered to to fess up when something isn't doing so? Well?
Ruth Ashbee:
Yeah, I mean, culture is an enormous art of making it work. And I think that's something that we can't wave a magic wand, but that's just something that we build, like with our day to day interactions, but also with sort of systems and structures that we have in the school things like do we have high stakes lesson observations? For example? Do we have unwieldy evidence for performance management because all of those things contribute to a sort of sense that if this isn't working, then I'm going to look bad? So I'm just gonna keep quiet. And you know, we need to think about that kind of that big picture.
And I think the more time that teachers can spend together talking evaluating just in that normal, you know, that kind of staff room sort of - there was a blog a while ago by Michael Fordham about a brown sofa in the history department office. And it was just so evocative that just the sort of the conversations that they would just have as part as a team sort of every day, actually, as leaders, we can create the time for those conversations by just freeing up department time.
Steve Mastin:
I think if senior leaders are creating a culture in their schools, which encourages departments to have conversations around the curriculum, I think of heads of department that I know in schools where they have the freedom to be able to say we're not going to do admin if we can help with in department meetings. What I'm going to do as a head of department, is I'm going to send out an article for the people in my department to read. I'm not going to expect them to do it before the meeting because they've got lots of other things going on. We're going to spend the first 15 minutes of my department meeting reading the same article about curriculum or perhaps a particular area of the curriculum. So maybe something that a historian has recently written or listening to a podcast for 15 minutes together, and then have a discussion about so how would this influence our curriculum? What does that make us reflect on? Are we teaching this with the latest scholarship bearing down on us? How do we reflect on the way in which that particular aspect of year nine relates to this in year seven because of what we've just read, and senior leaders are making time for that culture to be celebrated rather than being seen as a luxury or an indulgence? Decadent to do something like that? If people are listening to what I just said, and thinking, gosh, that's a bit decadent, well, then we're thinking about the wrong things when it comes to curriculum.
Chris Jones:
It strikes me from what you both said that, clearly the the evolution of a curriculum is likely to happen over time. It's likely to involve your discussion and thought, practice and assessment and, and so on. And, Heather, I want to come back to the Ofsted angle on this so and talk a bit about what what are our expectations for what we'll see on an inspection you know, how do we are we expecting perfection here? Or in fact to do it? Are we able to recognise that as I've said, these things do do take a bit of time to get to where people might want them to get to?
Heather Fearn:
The really most crucial thing in education is that pupils are learning what they need to so that they can achieve the ambitious goals that we've got for them from their education. On inspection, when we're not looking for any particular paperwork or complicated planning system or codes or endless sorts of different files with different things in different things. What we want to look at is, are these pupils learning what they need to step by step that means that they are going to be successful? And so that means just just looking at your curriculum plans and seeing and talking through them with you. We don't have any special view of what plans might look like or any expectation with that regard, but talking to you about what your planning is, and whether that plan has identified what pupils need to learn step by step towards those ambitious goals that you have for your pupils.
Chris Jones:
And we just know it's a particular challenge for primary schools and small programmes in particular, just to reassure you, you know, as a Jonathan said, do keep it simple. both Steve and Ruth have said some things that are just really useful to hang your conversations on. And it's all about coherence. Can you describe the journey that your pupils go on in terms of how they get better at those different subjects? And those are the questions kind of why this why now and how is what they're learning preparing for what's going to come in the future and how is what they have learned, prepared them for where they are now?
Heather Fearn:
When we go and listen on visits, we're not judging the teachers and we're not judging lessons, but we are thinking about whether those pupils learning what they're learning now have been set up and prepared for that lesson now by what's gone before and yeah, are they actually learning it now? Has it been learned? Have they remembered the things they need to for the lesson they're in now?
Chris Jones:
Every time we have these conversations about curriculum, which has been quite a lot over the last few few years, I'm always taken back to my time at school, and the sharp contrast between those lessons in which I felt confident and those lessons in which I felt all at sea and you know, thinking about it, now it's quite clear where I felt confident and I felt motivated and I felt like I'd achieved is because of the things that we're talking about. I could remember what happened in the previous lesson or set of lessons and I was presented with something to build that upon and to take it on to the next level and those where, I felt all at sea, demoralised and, frankly a bit upset, was when I was given a task with no background information, no explanation, nothing to build it on and just told to get to get on with it. And I think that's the that that is the impact of a good curriculum versus a weaker curriculum on the children, the class of children.
Jonathan keay:
That's the most simple, most important curriculum planning. I want to be here by the end of this sequence of lessons. What do I want my pupils to have learned? And then next question, what activities are most likely to ensure they would learn that and that granularity and detail you haven't got to start from scratch? Now think back to my time as a teacher and a head teacher, you know, we adopted schemes we made use of what other local schools were doing, and just made it work in our context. So don't feel you've got to start from scratch. There's plenty of stuff out there.
Steve Mastin:
It's very popular now in schools to use what's commonly called retrieval practice. But yet retrieval practice is misunderstood in some schools, with some people thinking that if we do retrieval practice, which amounts in some schools to not much more than just some random quizzing at the start of a lesson, that that's what the Ofsted inspector wants to see. But of course, what is it that you're retrieving? And why is a more important question than do you do retrieval practice? So getting back to what Heather was saying that we're not wanting to see in lessons, all singing, all dancing, wizzy, kids up all over the place, having a really fun time. You know, the throwing the kitchen sink at a lesson because you know, it's being inspected? It's the opposite. It's isn't obvious when you're doing retrieval practice, that these are the things you want children to remember. And these are the reasons why to remember those things because those things that you're retrieving are going to be useful in this lesson and in future lessons, rather than just quizzing for the sake of quizzing.
Chris Jones:
Very helpful. Thank you. I want to take a minute for the hard-pressed classroom teacher in a primary school, they might be it might have been given a subject or more than one subject to lead. They're largely trying to trying to survive day to day in some cases, with planning and delivering lessons and marketing books and so on. What can we say to people about why this is a really important investment of of time and what can we say to school leaders about your why, why this this type of planning should be should be prioritised above some of those other activities.
Jonathan Keay:
How simple can we make this? I guess? Pupils deserve to have things to think with and that's, that's what makes it possible to do all of the hard stuff in life. And actually, if they're not given those opportunities to learn that knowledge, then then far less likely to be able to do some of the complex tasks, perhaps in relation to exams, but nevermind that just the things day to day, their opportunity to take part in conversations that they might not normally be able to.
Chris Jones
Ruth, what do you think?
Ruth Ashbee:
Well, I'd just like to push back slightly on the first part of your question there, Chris, because, you know, if teachers are struggling to survive, then I think that our job as leaders must be to first of all ask, why is it that they're struggling to survive and what can we take away or what can we do differently so that they're so that they have capacity to focus on something as important as curriculum? I don't feel we should be going unnoticed, that isn't what you meant, but it's not a case of, you know, dig deep because this is really, really valuable. It's like, actually, do we need to be marking books or can we be using whole class feedback or responsive teaching? How many hours does it actually take to do this? You know, it's only CPD, we can sort of speed things up or streamline things or, you know, what can we do as a school that is the climate that teachers need in order to be able to, you know, fully engage with curriculum thinking and then once you get that, you know, it does become very addictive as well. You know, I'm not saying, you won't get teachers who are kind of go to conferences on the weekend and reading around that subject in their spare time as well. And that's wonderful. And, you know, we're very lucky that there are lots of people who do end up wanting to do that in our profession, but like, that can't be the expectation, teachers have got to be able to do a really good job of engaging in curriculum. Just as part of the normal working week.
Shreena Kotecha:
So can we talk a bit about how different subjects are dealt with differently? So how, for example, a science curriculum which enables if you have more expertise, and the humanities curriculum, which I see we have more expertise on, might be developed differently, but can we also talk a little bit about to what extent there should be or can be overlap between tea?
Heather Fearn:
Yeah, I think there's there's quite a few things that it's important to understand about science curriculum. Firstly, obviously, we've got three sciences physics, chemistry and biology. The way that it's examined is very yes, no, right or wrong answers, but that impacts a lot on the type of practice that we ought to be getting students to do. There's, you know, it's a hugely broad and wide discipline and students have to remember an awful lot. I think you still get sort of some residual thinking about kind of you know, maybe Bloom's taxonomy or sort of literacy activities and you get sort of spurious, debates introduced or evaluations introduced, sometimes that sort of go against the nature of the subject, you know, that there are certain elements of it where it overlaps with kind of ethics or broken society and so on. But by and large, it's about factual claims, explaining the natural world and making predictions about what will happen in the natural world. So it's important to recognise that when we are defining the sorts of quality practice that we'd expect students to be doing in sesson to learn that material.
Chris Jones:
And Steve, what how does that differ? Or does it differ in history and humanities?
Steve Mastin:
It's foundational to any curriculum to think of that, not just in terms of the substantive knowledge, the what that children are learning and the order in which they're learning it? But but also that disciplinary knowledge, and that's where line managers in secondary schools can allow their subject specialist head of whatever to think about the discipline, how it works. So for example, in geography, geographers think about the sense of place in a very specific way and when they talk about place, they don't mean location, location is where you can see where somewhere is, by its coordinates, but a sense of place is all to do with so how do the people who live in that place understand that place and how do they talk about their sense of place? And I as a geography teacher, let's say teaching about the Amazon, I'm going to represent the Amazon to children, but that's not necessarily how the Amazon is. So it gets quite complex. But of course, that's why you need geography specialists to be able to understand how you teach children to describe a sense of place. Likewise, in history, we ask questions about causes and consequences and change and continuity and similarity and difference, but you wouldn't want to see let's say in a in a primary history lesson, children's saying, 'So do you like this period of history? What do you think of the Vikings? Would you rather live at the time of the Vikings all the time of the Romans?' So we've suddenly stepped outside the discipline of history, and we're now asking children to, you know, give their opinions and there's nothing wrong with asking open ended questions, but they must be within the discipline, whether it's history or geography, not just engaging, fun questions, because as soon as we step outside, that discipline, then that curricular thinking thinking like historians or like geographers, is not being modelled and it's not being taught.
Jonathan Keay:
It's really useful to hear Ruth and Steve, using much of the language as well that you'll you'll find in our research reviews if you read them and that's really helpful to hear how these kind of things are washing up in the education community as well. Of course, colleagues use these terms all the time, but hopefully, the way they've described both of their subjects, there is another gateway into some of our work in the curriculum unit as well.
Steve Mastin:
It's great to just give one example, I think Shreena was talking about it, where you have connections between subjects, but not because you've shoehorned them in as if cross curricular clarity is the big goal, but where they naturally occur. So going back to that school in Enfield that I was visiting, I was sitting next to one of the schools ministers over the last year. And up on the board in this year for history lesson was a sentence that said 'Judea was a province in the east of the Roman Empire'. And the teacher wasn't teaching that, the teacher was then building new knowledge on that. And I turned to the school's minister and I said, how much sophisticated knowledge in history and geography is required just to understand that sentence? And do you notice the teacher didn't teach any of it? Because the children are coming to this lesson with that secure geographical knowledge so they know where to look on the map to find East. That's a simple example. But where geography and history naturally overlap. Then, of course, those connections should be made clear to pupils, but I think shoehorning them in ends up doing a disservice to both subjects.
Heather Fearn:
A separate but distinct point about subject differences, I think really was highlighted during the pandemic. And with the kind of urgency of catch up because it's very easy to have sort of homeschool messages about what catch up should be identify gaps. Intervene might be a kind of set of standard instructions when thinking about catch up, and that might work for maths. For example, or it might work for phonics, where the subject knowledge is kind of relatively hierarchical, you build on the next thing and then you find out for some children, you've got some gaps and you fill them in. Whereas for subjects like history and geography in subjects where Steve does more work, it might be that during the pandemic pupils simply didn't do the Vikings at all the instruction identify gaps Well, they didn't do the Vikings that's the gap assess the gaps or dentist because you know, they didn't do the Vikings. And another instruction might be make curriculum alterations, and actually that flips things because you don't want to make curriculum alterations in math, so you decide to skip fractions or in phonics you described you decide to skip the letter sound 'Mmm', because it's non negotiable, it's got to be covered and it's got to be learned. Whereas in history and geography and and subjects of that sort it might be possible to make curriculum alterations to sort of emphasise what might be most crucial to be able to keep going.
[music]
Chris Jones:
We spoke to Felicity Haresign, maths lead, and Kenneth Davis, the head teacher of Cliddesden Primary School in Basingstoke about their deep dive with Dan Lambert, Ofsted HMI, schools, and Kathryn Moles from the Education Policy Team here at Ofsted.
Dan Lambert:
Thanks very much, Chris. My name is Dan Lambert. I'm one of His Majesty's inspectors, and I'm really pleased to be joined today by Kathryn Moles, who is a specialist advisor in Ofsted's policy quality and training and more importantly, we're really pleased to be joined by Ken and Felicity. Ken is the head teacher at Cliddesden primary school and Felicity is their maths lead. And Felicity it was great pleasure of mine to inspect your school in November 2021. In terms of the deep dives, how did they feel and what did they involve?
Kenneth Davies:
Well, we knew from our phone call with you the day before Dan which was very useful, which subjects were going to be the focus for the inspection, obviously reading, which is what's happening in all schools, and we looked at mathematics as well and then we discussed the subjects that we felt was our strength, but I also got the chance to talk to you Dan, about the curriculum in general. And Felicity is our maths lead. I'm going to hand over to her to talk about her experience with the data.
Felicity Haresign:
When you have the Ofsted call, you are nervous, and I don't think you can change that feeling. But after the day, it was an intense day and it was full on but I came out with a positive feeling, everyone was really friendly. From the beginning Dan you joked about someone's laptop, not working on the day and my laptop works every single day, but that morning had decided not to. But that made me feel a bit more relaxed and it was it was both friendly and it wasn't threatening at all. I had to have a meeting and a chat about math as my subject, we talked about how maths is throughout the school, what the assessment is, like, how I planned it, where the progression is, and due to joining the maths hub several years ago we are working alongside it. So I'm quite confident and I was quite confident with how we set out our curriculum. So in terms of preparing for that, there wasn't so much to prepare for as we had done quite a lot of work over the past few years.
Kathryn Moles:
Nice good question, Felicity. And Ken, you both talked about feeling well prepared for the inspection and the subject deep dive and you've talked about the work you've done with your staff around that. Just explain to me what it's about preparing to understand what a deep dive looked like or - was it about preparing in terms of just being really clear about your subject and the kind of the way your subject was set up and what you were trying to achieve from it or a bit of both?
Kenneth Davies:
I think mainly it was about our curriculum really, being prepared. I mean, we I remember pre pandemic going to a conference and Ofsted conference at St. Mary's in Southampton, about what a curriculum should look like. Well, the quality of the curriculum is in terms of children should be acquiring knowledge. So it wasn't just about you know, Ofsted mean it's about getting the best for the children and making sure we are doing what we should be doing. So I think that that's what we mean in terms of preparation. It took time to evolve is still evolving a year after our inspection. I think in terms of being ready for the inspection as well. Obviously we wanted to showcase what we've done. So we didn't want inspectors coming in and teachers and subject leaders not really being able to talk about their subjects or or finding gaps in things, we wanted them to be prepared to to showcase what they've done and to be confident. And the same with the children as well, because we knew inspectors were going to talk to children's but after deep dives, and so you know, checking with children we're familiar with what they learn in be able to be able to talk about their learning in a confident way.
Felicity Haresign:
So preparing for me was more preparing to be able to talk about my subject. I know I'm an expert in my subject. I've worked really hard on it, but being able to articulate to somebody else what I've done and how it works in this school has been freshly built from early years to year six, which we thought carefully about, how we set out our assessments that teachers can really see where the children are, where their gaps are, and it was being able to talk about that confidently. We discussed deep dives in staff meetings which really helped us to be clear on what we wanted to share with the inspector.
Dan Lambert:
Thanks Felicity, it sounds like you're really well prepared and from memory, you absolutely were. I've got a question - in that initial discussion with inspectors, did you feel that you were able to really describe and give inspectors a really clear picture of your subject and what they should expect to see during the day?
Felicity Haresign:
During my subject leave chat with the inspector, she asked most of the questions that I was expecting, most of the things that we have been through during the staff meeting. And over the last year, I had a teacher assessment sheet that worked alongside our maths curriculum. So I was quite proud of that to show the inspector and she was willing to look at the assessment.
Dan Lambert:
Thanks so much Felicity, that was really interesting and great to hear. After those initial discussions with inspectors, you will have started to complete some lesson visits. Talking to pupils inspectors would have also looked at people's work as well. Can you tell me a little bit about that?
Kenneth Davies:
So I was lucky enough to join the inspector on visiting classrooms to look at mathematics across the school ranging from year six down to the early years. I also was able to join my English lead in our discussion with the inspector about phonics and reading. And then I know the inspectors have the opportunity to talk to the children about their subjects, hear children read and also talk to them about other aspects of their learning school
Kathryn Moles:
And you are a small school as well and having two inspectors on site for one day working with with colleagues in the school can be a challenge. How did you manage that?
Kenneth Davies:
It was a challenge ensuring that my subject leads felt confident that they could speak to inspectors on their own or whether they wanted a senior leader and again, senior management in small schools is very small. Well, I I kind of look at everyone as being a leader in my school to be honest, but whether they wanted someone to join them, and we made sure that there was an opportunity to do that with our our very, very efficient, capable LSAS covering if needed to when when they were speaking to inspectors.
Dan Lambert:
So Ken, it's interesting hearing you talking about your involvement in the deep dives because often in some schools you can find that head teachers feel quite removed from the deep dive process because it's all being carried out in conjunction with their subject leaders or those people responsible for subjects. So it sounds like that wasn't the case for you. It sounds like you were quite involved in what was going on.
Kenneth Davies:
Yes, I did. I did. I think the initial phone call the day before also help because it gave me the opportunity to discuss things with with them like to say because we're a small school I did join join for the English discussion. And also I got the opportunity in the afternoon to speak to Dan about the other subjects that we hadn't deep dived into, we looked at a bit about geography and design and technology as I recall and some of the children's work, in particular how we were moving forward in working out how we can assess these subjects or what they're more importantly, what we're assessing in those subjects areas. I was just as busy as everybody else and didn't feel disconnected at all. But also I think part of the role of the head teacher is to make sure the well being of all your staff and to make sure everyone's feeling good and relaxed and willing to participate the best they can.
Dan Lambert:
Good to hear. That's exactly how we want it. This is a bit of a rare privilege for me because I never get to see the same people twice when I've inspected them so I'm gonna seize the opportunity if I might. Obviously we talked about areas for improvement what was working really well in the school and you can build on further and a few areas that need to address. It's a good year on now. So how is the school changed?
Kenneth Davies:
One of the areas that was identified was making sure that there was consistency in subjects all the way from foundation stage to year six. We revisited in particularly our geography curriculum, well the largest gap was to ensure that there was progression, things weren't repeated unnecessarily. We've also worked on on our assessment techniques, we are very much in the position that with the foundation subjects and wider curriculum that we don't want to be producing some check sheets, it's more about the teacher assessment and getting the children to be able to, you know, be able to talk about what they've learned and maybe you know, a few little quizzes involved things like that, but also that they are acquiring that knowledge and but also acquiring the skills needed. That you need to be a good historian and a good geographer, a good technician, and those things are constantly constantly evolving. We have not sat back on our laurels.
Dan Lambert:
Fantastic to hear it sounds like it's been an incredibly busy year for you. It's been really, really great talking to everyone. Thanks Kathryn for joining us, and in particular thanks Ken and Felicity for spending your time today telling us about your experience of inspection. We wish we wish you all the best of luck for the year ahead.
Ends.
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