VIEWS & OPINION How to get your curriculum


Ofsted-ready Comment by GRAHAM COOPER, Chief Marketing Officer at Juniper Education


As schools continue to navigate their way through each new phase of the pandemic, the announcement that Ofsted plans to accelerate its inspections has prompted a flurry of debate. All schools are to be inspected by summer 2025 to assess how education is recovering from the Covid crisis, but with many hurdles still to overcome, how will schools be able to prepare for their inspections?


• Demonstrate resilience in challenging times Inspections can be stressful, but schools should see a visit from Ofsted as an opportunity. Schools are used to accountability measures and they welcome them as long as the inspections are carried out in a spirit of empathy and understanding. Ofsted will want to see how a school is addressing challenges and


mapping out its curriculum journey for the months and years to come. An inspection could provide a chance to showcase how hard staff have worked despite all the pressures of Covid.


• Design a curriculum for your pupils’ needs Ofsted looks at a curriculum’s intent, implementation and impact to judge a school’s quality of education. In essence the three ‘I’s ensure that a curriculum promotes great quality teaching and learning that makes sense, has a clear logic and is brought to life within a classroom. This can be achieved by looking at whether the curriculum is designed


to enable progression in knowledge, skills and understanding. Primary school leaders should ask themselves if their curriculum is preparing and inspiring pupils to be geographers, historians and mathematicians.


• Create a logical curriculum journey One of the key challenges for primary schools is to avoid taking a fragmented approach to curriculum design where children get distracted by activities and don’t realise they are actually having a geography or history lesson. The curriculum should all fit together and make sense to the children


so they know what they are learning and why. To make sure this happens, schools should ensure their curriculum has a clear direction of travel. Mapping out a curriculum from start to finish is a huge task but it’s an important one because it enables children to progress across every subject.


• Demystify the deep dive The deep dive methodology that Ofsted inspectors use to gain a better understanding of a school’s curriculum may appear daunting but it can be a good opportunity to review a school’s teaching and learning. Primary schools should test out the content and sequence of the


curriculum and make sure their staff have good subject knowledge. A deep dive will identify to what extent the teaching supports children’s progress. After taking a top-level view of a school’s curriculum with senior


leaders, inspectors will be able to see the curriculum in action by dropping into lessons and talking to people at the chalkface – the teachers and children. This way Ofsted can see that the SLT, teachers and pupils have a consistent view of the curriculum.


• Allow your curriculum to evolve Children respond differently to learning, so schools should be prepared to shift and redirect their curriculum if needed as long as it’s working towards the same destination. Assessment data provides valuable input into curriculum design, but


schools should look beyond the percentages, numbers and metrics and see the stories they are telling about how the children are becoming readers, writers and artists. School leaders can give inspectors confidence by setting out their


curriculum plans, even if some areas are still a work in progress. Although these are still turbulent times, schools will have much to be proud of when the inspection team walks through the door.


Resilience, climate change and systems thinking


Comment by FELICIA JACKSON, Chair of the Learn2Think Foundation


Resilience is a central word in education today – we need to help our children be resilient for the challenges they face, learn new ways of thinking that enable them to navigate the changing world of work. But it’s one thing to acknowledge that building resilience is helpful, and quite another to think through how to teach it in a classroom. One approach is to use systems thinking to explore the world in which we live. Teaching systems thinking encourages children to deepen their


understanding through making connections between what they learn, and the natural and man-made systems that define our lives. Harvard’s Project Zero defines a system as a collection of parts that have


some influence on one another and the whole. To be considered a system, the components must interact or influence each other in some way. Systems also have subsystems and may themselves be part of larger systems. As Albert Einstein said, “The problems cannot be solved using the same level of thinking that created them.” It can be done through finding topics that enable children to


understand how systems work, and identify the points where interventions can truly affect change. One of the most interesting of these is the interconnection between climate change and racism. There is a stark divide between the people responsible for climate change (those countries which build industrial systems on the back of coal, oil and gas) and those


February 2022


who suffer its worst effects. People of colour in developing nations are at most risk from floods and droughts and other extreme weather events, even though their contributions to global emissions are, and have been, very low. At the same time, it is often people of colour in developed nations who


suffer most from these impacts, as structural inequalities within nations are embedded within the systems that structure of our societies. The long history of the exploitation of resources and peoples has resulted in a legacy of inequality and unequal power relationships. That can play out in a myriad number of ways, from people of colour receiving poorer service, or a preponderance of medical knowledge and technologies optimised for white people being in use. We see these inequalities and such unfairness play out in many ways. Children may not understand the complexities of how such issues came to pass, but they can and do suffer from the impacts of racism playing out in different ways within society. Some may argue that children should not be exposed to the


complexities of such challenges, or that they should not be asked to engage with such heated issues. But these issues affect their lives on many levels from the macro to the micro – why shouldn’t they be given tools to understand why and how such things come to pass? Given the number of systems that we encounter every day, teaching


children to see problems in these terms gives them the understanding that systems can be changed. If a system exists, it can be influenced, changed, even disrupted. Teaching them to see and understand systems helps children ask the questions that matter – why do we do things one way, is there a better one? Why does inequality exist and how can we address it? If we can understand the story of how a system came about, ultimately, we have the tools to intervene and change it. Knowing that brings a sense of empowerment – and ultimately the opportunity to be an agent of change.


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