Improving your school’s curriculum takes a great deal of time and research.
Carrying out an overhaul of your curriculums may seem daunting, but schools must review them regularly to ensure they deliver the support required for pupils and teachers. Indeed, successful schools have a rolling schedule to review their curriculums and put time and effort into ensuring the process is carried out correctly.
Plenty of tools are available to make the job easier, so we will look at two that might help, but first, let’s examine why you should improve your curriculum.
Reasons to Improve Your Curriculum
Evaluating your curriculum is vital if you want to see improvements in progress and outcomes for pupils.
Ultimately there are five things that you can improve to make a difference in your school.
- Scaffolding – Provide opportunities in the curriculum to build on prior knowledge and skills in all subject areas.
- Sequential learning – In terms of lesson planning, a clear sequence ensures that all areas of learning are adequately planned for and provided. It will also help avoid education gaps, especially across year groups.
- Vocabulary Development – Include opportunities for developing subject-specific vocabulary and for pupils to have debates, discussions, and talk time in lessons.
- Reducing Teacher’s Workload – A curriculum overhaul can take much of a teacher’s time, so ensuring that the result will reduce their daily workload is essential. Focus on fully resourcing each subject with plans, source material, learning resources and assessment tools.
- Efficiency and Consistency – Creating useable resources and plans will allow teachers to use their PPA time more effectively and ensure a consistent approach across the school.
When updating your curriculum, focusing on the pupil’s needs is vital. Of course, you want to make things easier for teachers, but ultimately remember that the goal is to improve learning and success. Curriculum content should be rich and filled with opportunities for engagement and developing broader learning skills.
It should be easy for teachers to personalise plans and tailor them to the needs of their cohort and make them accessible for individual pupils. If teachers spend less time searching for materials and resources, they will be able to focus on the needs of their class.
Tools to help you Improve Your Curriculum
Here are some tools that schools may find helpful when looking to improve their curriculum and assist pupils in progressing their learning.
You can outsource your curriculum completely or find resources to help your subject leaders build their own curriculums.
Lion Learning Trust – This commercial curriculum, designed by teachers, delivers a complete package that combines content, sequencing and structure. It provides lesson plans with appropriate support and guidance to reduce the school planning workload.
The setup includes curriculum maps as well as digital lessons and assessment sheets. It makes it easy to track pupil progress and is available for years one to six.
Oak National Academy – If your subject leaders are designing or improving their own curriculums, they will find the resources and plans at Oak Academy helpful. It’s completely free and easy to use. You will find various resources, including quizzes, worksheets and slide presentations.