In carrying out any task, good preparation can ensure a smoother process and a better outcome. In regard to teaching the school curriculum, the quality of planning will directly influence how well it is taught, and will ensure clarity in recognising and assessing learning outcomes. We also need to be clear what we understand by the terms and concepts which we use to describe teaching, learning, curriculum and assessment.
The focus for planning will be a Scheme of Work which explains what pupils will learn over time, and how we will monitor and assess that learning. The taught curriculum in a subject is more than a list of things to remember and be tested on. With an evaluation focus on the Quality of Education, the quality of planning and how impacts on teaching, learning and assessment will be a key indicator.
The quality of planning will determine the quality of the curriculum
This is, sort of obvious – but it is the case that good planning will support good teaching, clarify learning outcomes, and make assessment more predictable. This article describes the key quality assurance role of the subject leader at the planning stage to understand the dimensions of the course, its purpose and its value and to express that in a Scheme of Work that will make clear what is to be taught and what pupils will learn.
It is part of the QA role of a subject leader to evolve an effective teaching programme for their department. The clarity offered here should provide the criteria and checklist needed to support that work. The effort needed at the planning stage should be rewarded by its impact and the clarity it gives the department. It should also be of significant help with the inspection conversation about curriculum intent, implementation and impact.
Making explicit the purpose of a course at key stage 3
A good place to start is to create some bullet points to state what is believed to be the purpose of each course offered at key stage 3. This may seem unnecessary, but without a national spotlight shining on key stage 3, it could seem that years 7-9 are just about marking time before pupils begin their GCSE courses. One indicator that this might be the case is when a school chooses to begin GCSE courses in year 9. This might appear to be an opportunity to improve outcomes at key stage 4, but it is also denying the value of learning the foundations of a subject, and the unique experience that pupils’ will gain from wider learning across a range of subjects.
So, a particular quality issue that should be considered is the question of whether the planned course at key stage 3 provides a good foundation for studies at key stage 4, and at the same time offers a worthwhile and self-contained experience of the subject for pupils who will cease to continue studies in the subject after year 9. The NC Subject Content statements (Attainment Targets) provided by the DfE are not the full picture in this respect. They describe the areas of learning in a broad summative sense, but significantly, don’t provide any guidance on how to plan for it or assess it.
Subject leaders have the scope to make learning in their subject at key stage 3 fit their vision of their subject by how they plan, teach and assess the content specified by the DfE. In this respect they should consider both the continuum of learning from year 7 to year 11, as well as the value of a self-contained learning experience within key stage 3.
Planning for progression
Planning will start with breaking down a subject curriculum (the NC Subject Content Statements) into a series of individual things that need to be taught. There will usually be a choice in how we order the sequence of their teaching. So an issue we will need to consider is how content taught in year 9 will differ from that same content taught in year 7. If we consider how progression will be recognised, it will clarify our understanding about how learning matures through a course.
Michael Fordham describes his work with Christine Counsell on defining progression at this link. They deduce that: “A curriculum is too frequently understood to be simply a list of things to learn and indeed, by some definitions, that is all it is. But . . . it did not just set out what was to be learned, but it provided a sequencing to that. A curriculum sets out the journey that someone needs to go on to get better at the subject. In short, it models the progress that we would hope (although cannot guarantee) that someone will make. The curriculum is the progression model.”
A key feature of good curriculum design will be a well-planned Scheme of Work which has progression built into it. The advantage of pre-planning progression into a Scheme of Work is that if we can see that pupils are mastering what they are taught then we know that they will be making progress. We won’t then need to struggle to look for evidence of progress at a later stage.
From Component Learning to Holistic Learning
At the start of a course we will be teaching simple facts, ideas, concepts and examples designed to provide an incremental understanding and knowledge of the subject. How well pupils learn these elements of the subject will be monitored using tests and homework. As pupils go through the course they will see how these ideas build upon each other to provide a broader knowledge and understanding. Pupils will be given opportunities to apply their growing expertise to solve problems and develop capability in the subject. By year 9, the Scheme of Work will provide increasing opportunities to demonstrate learning across the whole attainment target, i.e. Pupils’ learning will gradually move from component learning to holistic learning. This is the essential concept which underpins progression through a course at key stage 3.
Analysis of Subject Content Statements
The analysis below is about as thorough as planning gets. It is the formalised thinking time that can go into breaking the Attainment Targets (Subject Content Statements) into the component themes, activities and resources that will be needed to teach them, and expressed in a spreadsheet format.
It shows how this Subject Leader has broken down the Attainment Targets into the ‘big picture’ language of the subject, by identifying processes characteristic of the subject, the context in which they can be taught, other attributes that we would wish to the pupil to acquire, the focus for lessons to teach these, the activities that would support the lesson, and the resources that are available to the teacher.
Question: Do I need to go into this amount of detail when planning our Scheme of Work?
The value of this analysis is that it is already suggesting the sorts of things that might go into a Scheme of Work. The Scheme of Work will describe what will be taught lesson-by-lesson. An important step is to ask what component of the subject will each lesson be designed to present, and what would we expect pupils to learn as a result. So for each lesson we should anticipate and note the Learning Outcome we wish to achieve, i.e. a component piece of knowledge, understanding, skill, or thing remembered. A key outcome for each lesson might be an ability to apply what they have learnt in the lesson, e.g. answering a question or solving a problem.
There will already be well-developed Schemes of Work in every department in a school. The check here is that it reflects a detailed understanding of how best to teach the Attainment Targets indicated above, and that each lesson has identified a Learning Outcome upon which assessment could be based.
We must remember that we cannot begin to assess the Attainment Targets, i.e. holistic understanding of the subject, until towards the end of the key stage, once sufficient of the subject content has been taught.
The Scheme of Work
The diagram below shows a glimpse into a section of a Scheme of Work for Computing. This Scheme of Work has evolved from the initial planning described above, which shows the teaching units, the Topic they will cover, the teaching Themes which interpret the Topic and show the content for each lesson. The last two columns identify the expected Learning Outcomes for each Topic and a reference to the Attainment Target which the Learning Outcomes will contribute to.
The Learning Outcome numbers refer to the separate list of Learning Outcomes derived from the analysis of the attainment targets, and the planning of the Scheme of Work.
The diagram below shows a section of the list of Learning Outcomes chosen by the subject leader, which in the case of this example of Computing total 80 across the three years of teaching at his key stage.
The number and nature of these will obviously vary from one subject to another, but the principle applies that, at the planning stage we are aiming to anticipate the learning outcome to each Unit of work.
Effective planning makes assessment more predictable
The beneficial effect of this is to know that if we teach a unit of work and observe formative evidence that pupils are approaching Mastery of these attributes, then the assessment is already done for us. This is because Mastery statements correlate with GCSE grade pairs. So a Mastery judgement also provide a measure of current attainment. We also need to bear in mind that Mastery is a dynamic property and that a characteristic of Mastery is allowing pupils to revisit and improve their Mastery of content already studied. Subject to available time,pupils will revisit and improve their understand of an area being judged. We will ‘fix’ our judgement of mastery of each learning outcome at the summative assessment stage – usually by an end of term test or examination. On the way to this we can expect indicative Mastery judgements to change.
Generally, in monitoring pupil progress at key stage 3 we would be noting the extent to which the Learning Objectives were being mastered (mostly by a process of Formative Assessment). Towards the end of key stage 3 we will wish to see whether pupils were making progress towards acquiring the Attainment Targets. The main opportunity for Summative Assessment would be an end-of-key-stage examination, supplemented by end-of-year tests
By the end of key stage 3 we should be able to report on whether the Subject Content statements (ATs) were attained, usually by using grading based on GCSE number grades. Reporting during the key stage could usefully be based on notes on the Learning Objectives mastered , on a termly, and yearly basis.
This could be supplemented by a prediction of the most likely grade attainable by year 11. The prediction would be based on a broad range of evidence arising from the extent to which Learning Outcomes were being mastered, from contextual information gathered, from expectation from KS2, and from the teachers’ prior experience of teaching the course.
Effective planning supports school inspection
With an Ofsted inspection focus on the Quality of Education, schools which have undertaken this level of detail in their planning of key stage 3 will stand in a strong position to speak and provide evidence to support a subject areas view of the Quality of Education, and Its Intent, Implementation and Impact. An important aspect of this is to demonstrate clarity in the purpose and value of school provision at key stage 3 and its impact on the effectiveness of learning at key stage 4. At a national scale, key stage 3 is often an overlooked area. Schools that can bring this key stage to life and show its value will be in a good position to assert how quality and purpose runs through all of years 7-11.
This article was designed to make a case for the value of detailed planning by subject leaders which makes clear the rationale for the Scheme of Work, which sets out Units of Work, and describes what pupils will gain from each Unit of Work. It shows how these Learning Outcomes build up a Capability that can be expressed through an Attainment Target (or Subject Content Statement). The Scheme of work will be supported by a reference set of Learning Outcomes which cover the three years of key stage 3 for the subject. Overall, this will provide a framework into which teachers can plan and manage lessons. Such planning can be retained and developed from one year to the next or even provided centrally where a group of schools works together.
There is another article in preparation which will take these ideas further and discuss the tricky word ‘Progress’ and what it means in different situations.
What we learnt from developing ‘Curriculum-Driven Assessment‘
In 2020, our team developed an approach that we called ‘Curriculum Driven Assessment’. This was in response to ‘Assessment Without Levels’ when schools were trying to find alternatives after the DfE scrapped the use of ‘Levels’.
This approach embodied the ideas described above and required a detailed level of planning to make explicit the relationship between Learning Outcomes and Attainment Targets. We trialled this approach in a cross-section of schools covering most subjects with schools sharing their Learning Outcomes for us to make available as examples.
Detailed planning needn’t lead to over-complex assessment
What we learnt from this is that the planning that schools do can stand alone from the assessment method that the school uses. The level of detail that goes into planning a scheme of work doesn’t need to make the assessment process more complicated.
We had linked them in the system that we devised, and this had made the use of this approach less flexible and not easy to change and adjust as schools wished to revise to their Schemes of Work or Learning Outcomes.
The need for greater flexibility
It also became clear that any system used to manage planning, teaching, learning and assessment needed to be very flexible. No system can assume a different reality to what happens on a day-to-day basis in a school. Lessons can be cancelled, IT systems go down. Pandemics can appear. Gaps can occur in a Scheme of Work. If a tick can’t be put in a box then the box needs to go. The bottom line is that a system shouldn’t force itself upon the pragmatic decisions that teachers need to make in their work.
Any system to support teaching must allow for planned and unplanned changes in their design, with the system helping the process and making professional life easier when things are not all working as planned.
No scheme of work will be so perfect that it won’t need to be improved. As our knowledge advances we strive to make things better. Teachers will review their lessons and wish adapt their planning for next time. So, every aspect of a system needs to be editable, and if changes are made during a course of study, the system needs to allow for this whilst retaining the value of what has already been captured.
Implementation of a flexible systemised assessment scheme based on this should aim to involve little more effort that it normally takes to manage teaching, learning and assessment at this key stage, whilst allowing teachers to change and improve how they are doing things.
Our team has been working with many schools and some of the larger Multi-Academy Trusts with the aim of developing a choice of approaches at key stage 3. This will include tracking using GCSE grades, the use of custom grades, including Mastery terms. The approach will be underpinned by detailed planning, but the main design requirement is that it will save teachers and schools time and effort in monitoring, assessing and reporting pupil progress at key stage 3.
Good planning as set out in this article will provide the context in which these approaches will be at their most effective.
Other articles on these pages describe how we can use data more efficiently to support our work, and how we can understand more about the term ‘progress’.
We invite those with a keen interest in these issues to offer their thoughts or comments on any points made in these articles from which we might learn and improve our thinking.
Contact details: enquiries@mikebostock.com
Making good use of data in schools 