Why we need to stop doing the Romans!

Poor Romans! They don’t want to be ‘done’ to. And the same applies to Judaism, poetry, volcanos etc. Instead, we need to talk about ‘teaching about’ the Romans and the other units. Why does this matter?  Well, it’s more than semantics. It has implications for how we think about planning, delivering, and evaluating the curriculum.

If we are ‘doing’ as opposed to ‘teaching’ a unit on the Romans, then it can sometimes legitimise using poor quality resources; not necessarily in every case, but there is a real danger of this. When we flip it to ‘teaching about’ we are obliged to pay more attention to the ‘what’ of what we intend to convey and then check for whether our pupils have learnt it.

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. There is something important in this anecdote and it is this: that the fact that I have taught something does not mean that my pupils have ‘got’ it. And they are unlikely to have really learnt something unless they produce something worthwhile with the material they are studying.

In the video explaining the rationale for the national curriculum, Tim Oates talks about curriculum ‘products’. When he talks about products, he means the things which pupils write, say, draw, the low stakes tests they complete or the things they make. All these provide insights for the teacher into the extent to which pupils know, understand, and can do something on their own terms.

We are more likely to take this measured, intentional approach if we start shifting the language from ‘doing’ to ‘teaching’.

Five caveats for the curriculum

One: there’s no need to have everything in place for us to get cracking. Sometimes, there’s a reluctance to make a start until all the plans are written up. As long as there’s an overview in place, there’s no need to have all our ducks in a row before we make a start. The likelihood is that we are going to adjust the plans in the light of experience. Beginning, as Churchill said, is half done.

Two: The plans are never more important than the pupils in front of us. There can be a temptation to plough on regardless, even if something isn’t working and if pupils haven’t truly grasped something. The plans are there to support teaching, not dictate it. If pupils are not learning what we intend, we need to adjust. Which leads to:

Three: We need to beware the ‘curse of content coverage’. It can feel as though there is an awful amount to be taught. But if our plans are not underpinned by concepts and big ideas, it is hard for our pupils to make connections. As Stephen Pinker says ‘disconnected facts are like unlinked pages on the web: they might as well not exist’. Ploughing through the content is not a sufficient guarantee that pupils have learnt that content unless they are able to make the connections.

Four: Light touch assessments need to gauge whether what we have taught has been learnt. What we teach should be more important than mapping against multiple key performance indicators, which mostly don’t tell us anything and which can affect what we teach in order to turn our pupils ‘green’.

Five: The curriculum is a never-ending story. Lots of colleagues are saying that they are not as far ahead as they would like to be on their curriculum journey. That will always be the case: there will always be something that we want to refine, ditch, add depth. We need to enjoy the fact that curriculum is never-ending. What we are offering right now is probably good enough and that it will take time for it to get better. As Andrew Percival says ‘we need to create a curriculum culture in schools’ which means we relax into the idea that curriculum work is a living, breathing process.

Thinking about curriculum intent

In the quality of education judgement, the school inspection handbook states that ‘inspectors will consider the extent to which the school’s curriculum sets out the knowledge and skills that pupils will gain at each stage (we call this ‘intent’).’

One section within the ‘intent’ refers to the school’s curriculum reflecting ‘the school’s local context by addressing typical gaps in pupils’ knowledge and skills.’ Here, there is an opportunity to consider carefully what it is that pupils within a setting ‘might be missing’ and which the curriculum might address. For example, a school might have identified that some pupils have narrow minded attitudes to people who are different from them. In order to address this, some schools consider resources such as Shaun Tan’s The Arrival or a platform such as Lyfta which works to build vital skills and values by giving children access to human story-based learning experiences from around the world. Alternatively, a school might have identified that many pupils are coming to school with low levels of literacy, including speaking and listening and as a result they ensure that high levels of oracy are built into curriculum thinking by drawing on resources such as Voice21.

An important element within the intent section of the quality of education is frequent reference to ‘ambition’ and the extent to which a school’s curriculum is ambitious for all pupils: ‘there is high academic/vocational/technical ambition for all pupils, and the school does not offer disadvantaged pupils or pupils with SEND a reduced curriculum.’ What underpins this is ensuring that pupils with lower starting points are not offered a diminished diet, but rather are supported to access demanding work, through appropriate scaffolding and support, primarily through talk.

The handbook goes on to say, ‘It is clear what end points the curriculum is building towards and what pupils need to know and be able to do to reach those end points.’ What is entails is having a clear rationale for the importance of individual subjects and we might ask ourselves what would our pupils miss out on if they did not learn this subject in school? This helps us to identify the big themes and ideas that pupils need to be taught. While the content to be taught is set out in the national curriculum programmes of study for each subject, discussion of the importance of the subject itself is an important precursor to curriculum planning. It is not enough to say that we are teaching history or geography or design and technology or any of the other subjects ‘because it is in the national curriculum’, our rationale needs to go beyond this. 

In order get some purchase on the importance of individual subjects we might consider quotes such as Marcus Garvey’s ‘A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.’

We do not need to agree with this, but we do need to formulate our own rationale for why we are teaching a particular subject. This is because it takes us to a deeper, more satisfying curriculum space. Ideas for discussion about the importance of each of the national curriculum subjects can be found in the resources on this site. And quick overviews of each subject with draft planning outlines can be found here.

The judgement focuses on factors that both research and inspection evidence indicate contribute most strongly to an effective education and to pupils achieving highly. One of the factors identified is the curriculum being planned and sequenced so that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before and towards its clearly defined end points. This means schools taking account of findings of cognitive science which identify the importance of concepts, sequencing and spaced repetition in order to help pupils retain learning in the long term memory. The Great Teaching Toolkit is a good starting point for engaging with this element of curriculum planning.

When judgements are made about the quality of education, the school’s curriculum intent flows into the implementation, in other words, how the intent is translated into classroom materials and how the subject is taught. We see this in the following statement: ‘the school’s curriculum intent and implementation are embedded securely and consistently across the school. It is evident from what teachers do that they have a firm and common understanding of the school’s curriculum intent and what it means for their practice. Across all parts of the school, series of lessons contribute well to delivering the curriculum intent’.

It is important to remember that the ‘intent’ and other elements of the quality of education section are not checklists to be ticked off. Rather, they are about ensuring that the curriculum offer is demanding and equitable for all pupils. As the framework states: ‘inspectors will not grade intent, implementation and impact separately. Instead, inspectors will reach a single graded judgement for the quality of education, drawing on all the evidence they have gathered and using their professional judgement. During inspection, inspectors will probe leaders’ understanding further but, most importantly, they will focus on gathering first-hand evidence. Inspectors will visit lessons, talk to individual teachers and pupils, and look at pupils’ work (in its widest sense) together with curriculum leaders to see whether it matches leaders’ intentions. Inspectors will then draw all this evidence together from different pupils, classes and year groups.