Case study - Curriculum sequencing for primary and secondary

Teachers and leaders in our network have been worried that this will lead to too great of a focus on recovering lost learning at the expense of future learning and over testing pupils to diagnose every possible gap.

In working across the Ark Schools network, and with hundreds of other schools through Ark Curriculum Plus, we’re helping teachers use curriculum sequencing to focus on the most essential knowledge and maximise the impact of diagnostic assessment.

Booster units

Rather than redoing or reviewing summer units, we’ve identified core knowledge from the summer that is a vital prerequisite to this year’s learning, and designed transition resources that help pupils move forward. For example, on return to school in September, our baseline diagnostic found that many year 8 pupils could not identify the structure of a metaphor.

English teachers will know that metaphors are often used to help pupils develop their analysis of the impact of a writer’s words, and that this contributes significantly to achieving the aims of the national curriculum at key stage 3 in English.

Although pupils revisit and consolidate the use of metaphor throughout key stage 3, we know that pupils are likely to perform more poorly in subsequent units that have been designed to build upon pupils’ understanding of them. Having identified the significance of metaphor, we developed a 2-week poetry booster unit that focused on this core knowledge.

We prioritised poems such as, ‘What is the sun?’ by Wes Magee, ‘Ironing’ by Vicki Feaver and ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake. These varied poems play with metaphor in obvious but complex ways. The lessons were designed to quickly and efficiently secure and assess pupils’ knowledge.

Teachers found the booster units had an impact on both pupil knowledge and confidence. A subject leader explains:

All our pupils made progress in the two weeks. When we retested the poetry section of the baseline assessment, they could all do it. It made the pupils feel much calmer, their anxieties were allayed – perhaps that closure in March hadn’t impacted on year 8 as much as they thought it had. They saw for themselves that they had caught up – they could analyse the metaphor. So much so that period 5 on a Friday, my year 8s forgot to leave because they were so busy reciting poetry to each other!

Careful sequencing of opportunities to address missed education

While some core knowledge has been identified as a vital prerequisite for the year ahead – and addressed through booster units – to reteach all the core knowledge from the summer term in the autumn would clearly leave pupils further behind.

We therefore mapped all the remaining core knowledge from the summer term (as well as some learning from the previous autumn and spring terms that would usually have been consolidated in the summer) against the year ahead.

This means that teachers can look ahead to the most appropriate opportunities to revisit or reteach problem content. We’ve also identified key exposition and practice resources from the summer, and mapped these into the curriculum for the year ahead, so teachers can access high-impact resources precisely at the moment that pupils most need them.

Let’s take the example of year 5 maths. In the summer term of year 4, pupils would usually study 3-D shape, position and direction, and reasoning with patterns and sequences.

Short, daily sessions of engaging consolidation and practice are an established component of our mathematics programme – we call these Maths Meetings. We’ve determined that much of the 3-D shape and position and direction content in our year 4 summer term programme can be effectively taught through Maths Meetings.

However, we’ve added an extra week focussed on shape to the end of the autumn term for year 5 this year because we think the amount of new 2-D shape learning in year 4 is too great to teach through Maths Meetings. This is because a lot of important shape language is introduced in year 4, and the summer term of year 5 builds on this - expanding 2-D shape vocabulary and revising and applying all previous 2-D shape learning to solve problems. So, teaching the year 4 content in the autumn term of year 5 this year allows time for consolidation of vocabulary, which can be built upon in the summer.

We’re expecting that, by the end of this year, our pupils will have learnt all the content we’d expect, so they are prepared to meet or exceed the expectations for their age.

Diagnostic assessments

We use 4 different diagnostic assessment types:

• baseline assessments
• termly tests
• fortnightly quizzes
• lesson exit tickets

All are designed to embed learning by returning to key concepts. Let’s take an example from English with a word like ‘corrupt’ that pupils would learn during the ‘Oliver Twist’ unit at the start of year 7. The word ‘corrupt’ will appear in a lesson exit ticket, and then a fortnight later it will come up in a fortnightly quiz to help them embed it, then it’s also in their end of term test.

We’ve chosen concepts and words that will be revisited in future texts. For example, when pupils study ‘Animal Farm’ in year 8, they’re coming back to that word ‘corrupt’. The diagnostic assessment is looking both forwards and backwards.

Assessment results are mapped forward in the curriculum so that teachers can pinpoint in the upcoming curriculum when the best time to revisit and reteach to close gaps will be. Rather than trying to close all of the gaps in that moment, teachers can sequence lessons and topics to meet the needs of their class.

Linking with home

We also make sure that the curriculum we provide for pupils at home, in case it’s needed, is fully aligned with the in-school curriculum.

For subjects including English, science and geography, we have developed pupil workbooks that have been designed for easy setting of work remotely, especially for pupils without IT facilities.

A teacher exposition section presents new information in pupil-friendly speak and addresses key misconceptions. Our authoring teachers adapted ‘turn and talk’ to become ‘stop and jot’. We interspersed the text with short tasks to help pupils stay on track whilst at home. We’ve also included a formative assessment element with pupils guided to complete various ‘fix-it’ activities depending on the exit ticket answer they give.

These workbooks offer consistency for both our pupils and our teachers. During time at home, pupils can follow the lessons in the booklet, and when they return to learning in school they can do so seamlessly. Our teachers are finding that, since introducing the workbooks, the quality of work that pupils are producing at home is significantly improved.

For those pupils who have access to digital resources over the internet, we have launched an online learning platform to enable independent learning, SpArk. The new platform offers an array of purposefully-curated, exciting, curriculum-aligned resources to spark curiosity and enable ongoing, independent learning at home. All of the resources on the platform are free to access and have been carefully chosen, often from third-party sites such as the BBC, to allow pupils to gain a deeper understanding of the subject that they are learning.

Additionally, for our maths and music programmes, pupils can benefit from fully aligned curriculum resources and lessons through Oak National Academy.

There is no doubt it has been a hugely challenging time for everyone working in education. At Ark, we’re keen to share knowledge of what we’ve learned about ways to maintain the integrity of curricula in times of severe disruption and hope you find this information useful.