Curriculum and staff development

Based on a conversation with Garry Littlewood for ‘Huh’. Garry is assistant head teacher responsible for curriculum and assessment at Huntington School, York and subject leader for food and textiles.  

A school which privileges curriculum development will ensure that time is found for curriculum work to happen. Schools like Huntington in York finish early fortnightly and have a two-hour developmental subject based session. There is always an agenda for this meeting. It is not administrative, it is about teaching and learning, it is about planning, it is about curriculum development. When it was introduced, the school wanted to move away from department meetings. The sessions had to be about teaching and learning. It revolutionised practice by providing time to really work together collaboratively.

It is important to identify the needs of the team. In food and textiles particularly, there are specialists in specific areas of the curriculum. There are textiles specialists and food specialists and they all need individual support. It is important to be able to communicate with your line manager, both your department’s strengths and the areas that are requiring some development. You must work hard at using some of that time helping to support and train colleagues who do find certain aspects of curriculum delivery difficult. As well as developing the curriculum, there are also training sessions where you have got that expertise within your department to share with other colleagues. Curriculum development is often about developing teachers’ subject knowledge.

Developing your schemes of learning with your team is crucial. Schools need to privilege departmental planning time. Teamwork is crucial to curriculum development, sharing resources and pooling both experience and subject expertise. It allows your schemes of learning to be developed over years and even decades. The line manager needs to be open to listen to someone with a specialist background and deep expertise, someone who has genuine nuggets of subject specific understanding of the curriculum. Those nuggets are self-evident to the subject leader, but actually they are not to someone who does not have that background. Being prepared to be surprised is a constructive outcome of the conversation between SLT line managers and subject leaders. 

Subject leaders really value the chance to talk the curriculum materials through with line managers. When deep work has been done, it will have taken lots of sweat and tears and also joy and laughter because it is very interesting as well, but it is not without some heavy lifting behind it. Senior leaders are paying someone a compliment when they ask, ‘Could you just talk me through this? So why have you got this here and why are you teaching that?’ Now all those big questions are actually very professionally rewarding. This is light years away from subject leaders handing in their schemes across five years, if that’s the case, and no one asks them any questions like one of the basic questions, ‘Is it ambitious?’ These deeper professional conversations are the real heart, the real grist of collaborative curriculum development work between SLT and subject leaders.

Curriculum conversations between subject and senior leaders

School leaders need to have purchase on the curriculum: why they teach the subjects beyond preparation for examinations, what they are intending to achieve with the curriculum, how well it is planned and enacted in classrooms and how they know whether it’s doing what it’s supposed to.

This is what John Tomsett and I set out to do:

While there has been truckloads going on in schools on the curriculum, we were aware there is sometimes a gap in the professional learning discourse between subject and senior leaders. And that this is potentially problematic when the line manager does not have a background in the subject for which they are responsible. John gives the example of his line managing languages: the head of languages has a double first from Cambridge, in German and Russian, while John has a CSE grade 1 in German. He has summarised the problem for senior leaders, including himself, as follows:

• We sometimes struggle to support subject leaders with curriculum development because we are often intimidated by the terminology used to discuss the curriculum

• We do not know enough about curriculum design

• We do not have a thorough knowledge of the subjects we line manage.

And from subject leaders, these are some of the things we have picked up 

• We feel we have to reinvent the whole curriculum

• We do not have the resources we need to shape the ideal curriculum we envisage;

• We are given unrealistic deadlines for completing our curriculum development work by senior leaders who do not know our subjects. 

So, we thought it would be a good idea to explore this space. And we did it by having conversations with terrific subject leaders. We argue that the onus is on the senior leaders to make the time and space to get to know the headlines of the subjects they line manage. And to do this, they need the support of subject leaders.

In the sessions we recorded, the subject leaders were asked by John what they expected a student to know, understand and do by the end of key stage 3 if they had experienced a really rich, interesting and demanding curriculum. John then asks them how they get pupils started in Year 7. These are John’s question prompts

• With a class of Year 9s in front of you, if you have taught them a rich, challenging curriculum, what does success look like in terms of what those students know, understand and can do in your subject?

• If that is your destination, where do you begin in Year 7 and how do you build up to that point?

• What would you like your senior leader line manager to know about your subject?

And this is what we found

One: That subject leaders are delighted to have the chance to talk about their subjects: a proper conversation about the ‘stuff’ they plan for their students.

Two: That individual subjects make a unique contribution to learning and all those we spoke to were clear that their subjects add value to lives beyond the formal curriculum. 

Three: The subject leaders were clear that key stage 3 was much more than ‘mini key stage 4’ and there are real opportunities here for subjects to treat key stage 3 as the intellectual power house of the secondary phase.

Four: We shouldn’t be intimidated by some of the tremendous teachers and speakers who make us feel this language and understanding is normalised. Only a minority of existing middle leaders have the language being used commonly about curriculum theory and so it needs a steady, pragmatic approach if we are to meet middle leaders where they are.

Five: As Claire Hill says ‘When you think about the vocabulary you use when discussing the curriculum with subject leaders, we need to be sensitive to the individual subject leader’s knowledge levels. It is all too easy to use curriculum-related vocabulary that intimidates colleagues. Across any school or trust there will be a significant variation in terms of where different departments are in understanding how to develop their curriculum. Whilst you might have some common language around core knowledge, hinterland knowledge and disciplinary knowledge etc., how you address that in different subjects varies depending on where that subject is in developing their curriculum.’

In summary

• Our subject takes students beyond qualifications – we are educating them for life

• If the curriculum is so important, then we need time for collaborative curriculum development

• Developing the curriculum is intellectually rewarding work

• We are not developing the curriculum for the regulator – we are developing the curriculum for our students

• The principles of each subject apply to primary and secondary

• Curriculum development is a never-ending process.

And that’s why we have called the book ‘Huh’ named after the Egyptian god of everlasting things.

You can watch a recording of John and Mary’s webinar here via the free membership.

Leadership support for curriculum development

The development of teacher subject knowledge underpins school improvement. It cannot be left to chance. In the implementation section of the Education Inspection Handbook 2019 it states that ‘teachers have good knowledge of the subject(s) and courses they teach. Leaders provide effective support for those teaching outside their main areas of expertise.’ 

It is the case that many colleagues are teaching outside their main area of expertise. In secondary settings, many will be teaching subjects which were not part of their first degree. Even where they are teaching within their first discipline, it is highly likely that the material they are teaching pupils was not covered during their degree courses. As a result, there is a need for ongoing subject development for colleagues in secondary.

 In primary, the situation is more pronounced. For the most part, colleagues are teaching or coordinating subjects which they have not encountered since their own secondary schooling. The foundation subjects units in PGCE courses do not have the same amount of time allocated as English, mathematics and science. As a result, work needs to be done in schools to develop subject knowledge for all staff.

When teacher subject knowledge is not prioritised, the default setting is to download materials and resources from the internet. Many of these have not been quality assured, often contain incorrect information, are of poor quality and do not provide sufficient challenge for pupils. It is really important that time is given to colleagues to source materials which are high quality. There are three principles to guide thinking about the use of classroom resources. The first is, does it make pupils think, or does it merely expect them to complete the blanks? The second is to ask whether the material is likely to take pupils to a place of mastery, over time: in other words, are they likely to be able to do something on their own terms in a new context, as a result of what they have been taught? And finally, is it beautiful? What is meant here, is not whether it is decorated with sparkles and glitter, but whether the resource links back to the subject domain. This means drawing on the artefacts, art, texts and current debates with the subject. It means using images which reflect the quality of the topic being taught. It means using the language and thought processes and ways of working particular to individual subjects. All of this might seem like a big ask, but those materials, such as the British Museum’s ‘Teaching history with 100 objects’ are available. School leaders need to provide the time for teachers to consider these, rather than downloading quick fixes from second rate sites.

It’s important to go to authentic sources in order to develop subject knowledge and high quality teaching materials. Some starting points for each subject are available here: they are available online, at no cost to schools. In making the time to do this work, we need to take a hard look at how staff meetings and subject meetings are run - they should be focused on subject knowledge and making that knowledge accessible to pupils. The head of one primary school realised that his teachers did not have a wide knowledge of children’s literature, and so used the staff meetings for reading. At the start of the meeting, a range of children’s books were available for staff to select and skim or read. They did this for half an hour and then the final twenty minutes or so were spent on discussing the books. An unexpected result of this was that many staff wanted to take the books home to carry on reading. An efficient way of moving the agenda on, a light touch way of expanding teachers’ repertoire.

A final point on cost. While the materials suggested are available at no charge to schools, it is also important that those leading a subject should be a member of the subject association. Curriculum development is at the heart of what they do, and membership should be a professional entitlement for every subject lead. And the argument here, is that the cost of subscription should be  paid for from the school’s professional development budget.