Some of the insights from psychology and cognitive science can be helpful in supporting to learn the curriculum. And it also has to be said that many of them are common sense! However, while they might be common sense, they are not always common practice.

If we are serious about the curriculum, we need to think about how pupils develop expertise. There is a paradox to this, and it links to mastery - if we are expert at something or have mastered something, the conundrum is that we realise how much there still is to know and understand. At its heart, expertise is knowing something really well; the nuts and bolts and are able to show this in different contexts.

When considering impact, the question that needs to be asked is whether our pupils have learnt what they have been taught and how do we know? It is important to remember that the impact judgement feeds into a single quality of education judgement, drawing together intent and implementation along with impact.

There is a joke about two men in a bar. One says to his friend ‘I’ve taught my dog to speak French.’ ‘Really?’ says his mate, ‘Let’s hear him then.’ ‘I said I taught him, I didn’t say he’d learnt it’ comes the response.

Let’s take a look at the range of things that pupils in our classroom use or consume: worksheets, power points, words, texts, images, paper, glue sticks. These are made available to them as part of their learning. And we need to consider the extent to which these elements are adding value to their learning, or whether they are part of a process that provides evidence, mostly flimsy that something has happened in the lesson.