Key:
Black: What schools can achieve through DPR
RED: Alternative to DPR
INTENT: rationale, ambition and concepts.
Schools architect their own curriculum intent for Years 7-11, ensuring local ownership and high levels of accountability against standards.
Less opportunity for schools to personalise their curriculum
Key learning objectives, differentiated by students’ starting points, are sequenced across years 7-11 and are made transparent to teachers, parents and students.
Curriculum can be personalised, ensuring ‘all groups of pupils can access the curriculum well.’
Software teams provide pre-made curriculum content, citing ‘reducing workload’ as their core incentive.
Mid-term-plans (MTPs), lasting 4-6 weeks can be created to complement long term plans (LTPs).
Pre-planned schemes of work may be available or ad-hoc plans created for schools.
IMPLEMENTATION: subject leadership, subject knowledge, equitable delivery, planning the progression model, breadth and depth and assessment
Leadership at all levels are involved in formulating and quality assuring of the school curriculum intent that feeds into the DPR.
Ad-hoc learning resources may be available that are not necessarily sequenced from Y7-11.
Curriculum coverage allows all pupils to access the content and make progress through the curriculum.
Ready made content does not always make clear the relevance of different materials required for students with different starting points.
The DPR interface ensures ‘clear methods to check what pupils know, can do and understand so that the right work is taught/informs teaching (assessment)’.
Often there is a disconnect between what the school has planned (SOW) and what teachers teach in the classroom. This makes it difficult to measure how effective the initial learning intentions are and therefore, how well the intentions are being implemented.
DPR ‘strategic overview’ and the ‘whole school insight’ allows ‘Senior leaders to make it their business to check implementation of the curriculum – it is not left to chance’
Powerful data is available, showing the level of engagement from the students and teachers with the schools curriculum intent.
There is nothing similar available as an alternative to DPR.
‘DPR collaboration’ strategically connects feedback (spoken and written), homework set and additional learning resources specifically linked to key learning objectives.
Often the curriculum is not connected in such a systematic manner.
‘DPR assignment’ allows teachers to set ‘expected’ amount of homework and also allows them to record the quality of homework submitted by students. School leaders can track and monitor the quality of homework that is both set and submitted by students, classes and departments.
Homework software only facilitates the setting of homework, but does not explicitly link it with the school curriculum intent. It certainly does not have powerful analytics that measures the quality of homework submitted and therefore the extent of its impact on the initial curriculum intent.
Teachers are able to create, share, re-use and rate each others' resources - including resources from different institutions. Subject leaders have the ability to quality assure resources uploaded by teachers. This powerful feature is the first step towards helping students to become independent learners.
Resources available can be ad-hoc and not explicitly linked to the school's curriculum intent.
Real-time, formative assessment, encourages both students and teachers to reflect on what is taught and learnt. This ensures that learning is always kept at the forefront of one's mind.
Assessment/marking is often retrospective. Most assessments are summative. Retrospective assessments are often inaccurate and not so meaningful.
Students can be put on various ‘pathways’, given their starting points. This also includes a very personalised curriculum for students with Special Educational Needs, which can be supported through the DPR ‘intervention portal’.
SEND students are often neglected. Their curriculum is not seen to be important enough to be given serious considerations.
IMPACT: ‘pupils successfully learn the curriculum and parity for pupils’
"A Forest Gate school is among just 11 nationwide to have been ranked in the top 50 schools for GCSE results four years in a row."
To demonstrate impact, let’s focus upon one of our key projects: the pathway X programme of studies.
For those who wish to learn about the ‘Pathway X’ initiative, please take a few moments and watch the video below:
The graphs below demonstrate the impact of students belonging to the pathways A and X programmes of study.
Students sat the GL Progress test at the end of 2018-19 academic year.
It demonstrates high impact compared with the performance of all other students nationally, who also took the same tests.
Further reading
2019 Ofsted inspection framework: what it means for your school (The Key-requires password/membership)
Dylan William: Principled curriculum design