Saturday, 13 January 2024

Curriculum: A longer read.

The word curriculum is apparently a near-constant part of my life lately.

I tweeted on November 10, 2023, this:


It led to a bit of attention, and ultimately to a guest appearance with Matt Findlay and Femi Adineran on the Beyond Good podcast. Since recording, Jonathan Hall started an event called a Maths Fuddle through Mathsbot, and his first talking point referenced curriculum too.


This is one the things, and there aren't many of them, where Jonny and I disagree. He's team 'Teacher', and I'm team 'curriculum'.

I want to put my thoughts down in full, so here goes...


Google's define: function returns this for 'define: curriculum'... the subjects comprising a course of study in a school or college. Straight off the bat, I want to clarify what I mean by curriculum, by saying that I mean the content that is intended to be taught to students. I use the term curriculum within the maths department interchangeably with scheme of learning or scheme of work.

In my 16 years in the classroom, I have followed various schemes with various cohorts of children. I've followed textbooks with KS3, and exam-board provided route maps with KS4. I've followed textbooks with KS4 too, as well as bespoke curriculum at KS3 (spoiler alert: it wasn't bespoke, it was self-made). I've followed off-the-shelf curriculums, and I've looked in to others that I haven't followed, and one thing was true every time... It wasn't the curriculum that was the problem, it was the implementation.

The implementation came down to many factors, but all led back to the thought that 'This is costing us money/has been shared by an exam board/is used by many, so it must be what we should be doing'. My main thought here is 'Well, just because everyone else is doing it wrong, doesn't mean we should'.

Take the exam-board-provided example (and I'll consider things outside of my lived experience, but close to). AQA provide route maps for their qualifications, and they're pretty good. They provide a decent journey through the specification (as pretty much all curricula do), but they don't provide the journey that my cohort needs. 

Their one-year resit route map begins with equivalent fractions, decimals and percentages, and this is often question 1/2/3 on a Foundation paper, but if I gave that to a group of students who achieved a grade 3, this is likely to be unnecessary for them to be taught. For those who achieved a grade U or 1,  this is likely to be the right thing. But, what will happen (and this is probably well-meaning, and it makes sense) is that leaders will see this journey, see that it has an AQA badge on it, and say 'The exam board are saying this is what we should do, so we'll do that'. I don't think that they're saying that you should, but they are saying that you could.

The same goes for CIMT/Complete Maths/Lumen/Sparx/White Rose Education, those Collins textbooks sitting on the shelf in the workroom, and those 1990s Maths Frameworking textbooks that have seen more dust than classroom time in the last 15 years. The main issue is that when an age is attached (as a guide, more than anything), children of that age must be expected to work with that content.

But what about the Year 7 child who hasn't grasped the column method for subtraction, the Year 8 child who hasn't mastered the idea of division, the Year 9 who hasn't learnt how to measure an angle, or the Year 10 child who hasn't learnt his times tables?! (These are all children I've worked with in the last week).

Should they be asked to look at Graphical Forms of Sequences, or Sharing Amounts in a Given Ratio, or Trigonometry, or Simultaneous Equations? (Spoiler: absolutely not). Experienced teachers know that they shouldn't, and effective teachers alter their instruction to the needs of their students. But here's what I believe... 

Simultaneous Equations as a topic is likely to be appropriate for about a fifth of the students in Year 10 (based on my experience), so the other four-fifths need something different. The experienced teachers know this, but those without that experience don't. The experienced teachers then teach something else - something that they're expected to decide, and the inexperienced teachers teach simultaneous equations with disastrous outcomes, because that's what the curriculum tells them to do. 

The curriculum should tell teachers what the students in their class need to cover next, not what the top 20% need to cover, and the rest of you should do something else. The journey through maths is well-defined, and differentiating down means that this isn't the journey that students see. They see something that's a bit like it, but easier. Because they're journey isn't well-defined, they find it harder to make progress, because their journey isn't coherent.

The gold standard of a curriculum is one that adapts to the needs of the students. I have experience here, and spent around 400 hours in a past role collating a curriculum that took students on a journey from the Year 3 National Curriculum, to AQA's Level 2 Further Maths qualification. We found that student behaviour improved, enjoyment levels increased, and attainment improved, taking us from 61% 4+ in 2018 to 75.7% 4+ in 2022. 7+ increased from 8.0% to 18.1%. Teaching became a joy and privilege.

So, how did I go about putting this in motion?

I think my first experience of realising that we needed something better was with a Year 10 bottom set, scoring less than 10% on tests, and then laughing about it. This had become so natural to them, that they expected to fail, and then it became a race to the bottom. My solution was to have them do the Entry Level Certificate in lessons, score 80% on each assessment, and development a culture of success, and wanting to do better.

A few months later I was approached by a colleague who'd taught Pythagoras to students. This was the second topic in the textbook. He commented that they were fine with the procedure, but hadn't a clue how to find square roots of square numbers. This was topic 5 in the textbook.

All students were doing the same tests, from bottom sets to top sets, with the top sets scoring 70% plus, and the bottom scoring 20% and below. This was accepted as the norm, and those students would just score that and be happy with it. This is where I targeted my first action - by having multiple assessments that staff could choose from to give their classes, that were comparable between groups, but gave students more success.

I worked, and continue to work, in challenging circumstances. High levels of disadvantage, high proportions of EAL, low levels of aspiration, and prior attainment below the national average. I'd experienced motivation in KS3 fall away since KS3 SATs were abolished, and the same at KS4 when modular qualifications were culled. Whether this is the outcome of external tests that means that students are taught the right maths when 'revising', or the students' motivation to perform on external assessments, I'm not sure, but either way, I wanted to harness this, and took inspiration from both.

I decided that I'd split the year in to 5 modules. The content of each module wasn't overly important, but the expectation that students would improve on their modular assessment from the year before was. Each of the 5 modules was split in to 9 units, where the content was hierarchical, and content is expected to be mastered before moving on.

The five modules were called Module A, B, C, D and E, with units going from 1 to 9. Module A consisted of Place Value, Symmetry and Transformations and Averages. B was Calculations, Angles and Sequences. Module C was Algebraic Manipulation, Charts, Fractions and Shapes. D consisted of Decimals, Equations, Properties of Numbers and Units. Module E consisted of Graphs, Perimeter, Area & Volume, Percentages, Probability and Ratio. I felt this gave time for skills to be taught before using them in later modules, but it's also important to state that content didn't necessarily begin in Unit 1 (Averages began in Unit 4, and Algebraic Manipulation was introduced in Unit 5). The whole journey is here (be warned of large file size).

A recent paragraph stated that 'content is expected to be mastered before moving on'. How do you achieve that? Well, this came down to assessment. Assessments were designed so that each Modular assessment had 9 sections (one for each unit). Each section consisted of 20 marks, so the Module A assessment was 180 marks long, but students only sat 60 marks from this assessment, decided by their teacher. If students had succeeded with content up to Unit 4, they sat the assessment consisting of sections 2, 3 and 4. If students achieved 15 marks in a section, they were able to achieve in the next unit, and have their assessment recorded as this.

A quick recap: A student would work on content from, say, Module C. They had been taught content from Units 3, 4 and 5, for example, so sat a 60-mark assessment on content from sections 3, 4 and 5. They might score 18 marks on the content from Unit 3, 12 marks on the content from Unit 4 and 9 marks on the content from Unit 5. This would mean that they had mastered the content from Unit 3, but not quite from Unit 4, and this is where their instruction would begin the following Year. In terms of recording this assessment grade, this would be recorded as 4.5 on the departmental tracker, indicating that they've had some success with Unit 4, and should work from this point in the next academic year when they return to Module C. Comparatively, a score of 18/16/9 would be recorded as '5.2' where .2 represents scoring 5 marks, .5 is 10 marks, and .8 is 15, which means they 'graduate' up to the next section of their assessment.

From a departmental leadership perspective, the tracker then provided an up-to-date record where students are on the journey in each Module (on each of the sections of 'the dartboard' as we referred to the image shared earlier), as well as a ranking based on the average of their 5 modules (updated with their most recent assessment. This means that sets can be assigned using the average level of proficiency across the 5 units, and tinkered with at the top and the bottom of each set to ensure that the spread of attainment in each group is as small as possible. Assessment data, as well as their set from each year remains visible so that trends can be spotted, but progress is calculated between each module from the current academic year and the previous academic year to celebrate progress made by students (rewarding the lowest attainers too, as they make good progress, rather than always those who go on to score the highest grades). The list of students making the most progress between modules was printed off and displayed proudly, so that those students who might not normally find their name on these lists were there, could tell their parents they were on the wall at school, and their peers can celebrate them too.

From a class teacher perspective, when you moved to another Module on the scheme, you looked at the tracker and saw where their attainment was last year. Acknowledging forgetting, this is where your instruction started, to activate prior knowledge, and then bridge to new content over time, confident that students were going to grasp the content that you were teaching. By the end of the Module, you 'ordered' assessments based on the levels of success that students were experiencing in lessons, and departmental leadership were able to check that staff were being aspirational when ordering their assessments, based on the spread of prior attainment visible from the tracker, and the numbers of each assessment ordered on the order form. 

From a student perspective, they were never out of their depth because they were building on success from the last time with content from that module, so they were motivated to succeed, their behaviour improved and so did their participation in lessons. They were accountable for making progress between modules, and celebrated when they did.

Heading back to the class teacher perspective, as in inexperienced teacher you were able to develop your pedagogy with motivated students, participating in lessons, knowing that if students weren't grasping the idea, that it was down to you, rather than the content. Teachers were also accountable for ensuring progress occurred.


I'll acknowledge some of the challenges associated with this operation, and there were many, but I won't remember all of them. But, where do you start with Year 7 students? Taking into account their prior attainment, start them on unit 1, 2, 3 or 4. It wasn't ideal, because their prior attainment wasn't recorded by us, and was sometimes quite different to what we experienced. But there was an acceptance that even if the level of complexity was a little off in Year 7, by the time we got back around to Module A we had assessment data from Year 7, and getting the level of maths right was much easier.
What about tiering at GCSE? They still did Year 10 mocks, Year 11 mocks, and from that we had grades and expected progress between each assessment point and the end of Year 11. We left tiering decisions until as late as possible, but in my eyes, if you're not going to achieve a grade 6, then you should be doing Foundation.
What about students who made no progress repeatedly? Well, we have their progress from previous years, and they're identified as needing more attention. They are the first students you check in with in periods of independent work, the first mini whiteboards that you check, seated close to the teacher for additional attention.
What if a class hasn't covered the content for the assessment? The class teacher chooses their assessment. A lack of progress is picked up at departmental leadership level if class-wide, and medium term planning can be looked at with the teacher in question.


Whilst I've been writing this, this has been in my notifications:


This is why I think having a good curriculum model in place is more important than having the best teachers. The curriculum's impact is felt beyond the four walls of an individual teacher's classroom, and from a departmental leadership perspective, this is what we should be aiming for.


This blog may be incomplete in places - sorry if that's the case. Feel free to pull at loose ends and ask for clarification. I'm sure that you'll be able to pick holes in my beliefs, and that's fine by me, because I'm happy to be told that I'm wrong. I just happen to believe that I got most of 'how a maths curriculum can work' right, backed up by a significant improvement in outcomes, and would love to see more places adopt a similar strategy.

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