Why is curriculum planning important?

An extract from ‘Intent Implementation Impact: How to Design and Deliver an Ambitious School Curriculum’ by Matt Bromley

For too long, the means, methods, and outcomes of assessments, not the curriculum, have held the sceptre in education but now the curriculum – it’s intent, implementation, and impact – is king.

Outcomes data (test and exam results, qualification pass rates and achievements, retention, value added scores and high-grade achievements) have been the primary means by which school and college effectiveness has been judged. Outcomes have often been the focus for senior leaders, too; underpinning teachers’ performance management, and driving teaching and interventions.

The means of assessment have also trumped the meaningfulness of assessment – for example, national curriculum levels became the primary method of describing learning and progress in primary schools and at key stage 3, and yet describing a learner as a ‘5a’ or ‘4b’ in, say, English, makes little sense because a level cannot possibly do justice to a learner’s grasp of complex curriculum content nor does an arbitrary level provide any useful information for learners and their parents/carers about what a child can and cannot yet do and what that child does and does not yet know.

Our methods and means of assessment should be driven by the curriculum and inform us if learners are making progress through that curriculum, rather than be based on dubious, arbitrary numbers or letters.

If curriculum dictates assessment, however, it will tell you who has and who has not yet mastered certain aspects of that curriculum. For example, who does and does not know certain key concepts.

In fact, once you’ve identified the destinations of your curriculum, these can be converted into curriculum statements or learning intentions which provide a ready-made means of assessment. For example, if one destination of the English Language curriculum is that learners have mastered the concepts of, say, explicit and implicit meanings, then we could devise a set of curriculum statements – or checkpoints – through which they each must travel.

They might, for instance, be taught to define the words ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit’, then be taught how to identify both explicit and implicit meanings in a non-fiction text. Next, they might be taught to explain why a writer has chosen to imply something rather than state it outright, and perhaps several different ways in which a writer could imply something. Then, they might be taught how to analyse the effects of explicit and implicit meanings on the reader. And so on and so forth.

Each of these ‘threshold concepts’ can become a simple ‘can do’ curriculum statement, assessed as ‘yes’ or ‘no’ – for example, “I can define the words ‘explicit’ and ‘implicit'”. This yes/no assessment tells us something meaningful and useful – concrete not abstract. It shows us how well and how quickly a learner is travelling through our curriculum towards the destination. It shows us what learners do and do not yet know and provides us – and indeed them – with tangible information on which we and they can act. It can inform our whole-class teaching, too – telling us what we need to go back and re-teach or re-cap.

As well as providing meaningful, actionable information to and about each learner, the data can be aggregated to provide useful information about the effectiveness of the curriculum. For example, we can ascertain at any point, what proportion of learners have acquired the expected standard or reached the stage we had planned for and predicted. If they haven’t, we know we need to revisit our curriculum model and the teaching strategies we have employed to ensure more learners make better progress in future.

These destinations and threshold concepts will and should look different in each subject, of course. In Science, they may take the form of key (or ‘big’) questions; in Geography, they may be features of the natural or human landscape. It is important, therefore, that school and college leaders allow their subject specialists the freedom to devise both a curriculum and a means of assessing that curriculum in a way that best suits the nature of the subject.

Having said this, school leaders can ask some common questions of all subject leaders, such as:

• What do you expect learners to know?
• When do you expect learners to know this?
• Why do you want learners to know this?
• How will you know when learners know this?
• What next?

But senior leaders need to avoid the temptation to provide standardised pro forma for all their subject specialists to complete. And senior leaders need to accept that all subjects cannot conform to a whole-school curriculum and assessment mould.

For more top tips on curriculum design, take a look at Matt’s book ‘Intent Implementation Impact: How to Design and Deliver an Ambitious School Curriculum’, which is available in paperback and ebook now. Visit our bookstore for details.

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