Case Study - Introducing a Key Skills Curriculum

In a previous role as a Key Stage Leader, I was responsible for leading Year One and Two. As a team, we quickly built a rapport with each other and key stage meetings were always productive, involving a mixture of sharing good practice and thinking ahead to what we would like to do better. After working with the existing curriculum for a year, I was very keen in my second year to make some changes. The existing curriculum was loosely based on the old national curriculum but was mainly generated from past planning documents. There was no continuity between Year One and Year Two and it appeared that the design was based on what previous teachers enjoyed teaching or found easy to teach. There was a lack of progression in skills for the children to develop, which made it difficult to consolidate previous learning and build on it.

Review

I began by scrutinising the current curriculum in more depth. I informally interviewed children, teachers and some parents and looked at various children’s work and books. From this, I established that the children were not getting the most out of their time in the Pre-Preparatory School. Several activities had been automatically repeated each year, for example, growing a bean featured in almost every classroom each year without any development of skills. The children’s books displayed no significant progression apart from the quality of their drawing and handwriting. When questioned, the children could not articulate any new learning from one year to the next. I felt we were not doing them justice. They were capable of doing more, learning more and we were capable of teaching better. I wanted to raise expectations both for the children and for us as the teachers, but I did not want to design a curriculum that was too prescriptive and therefore risk reducing the teacher’s creativity.

Research

I started to research current practice around curriculum design. I also attended a conference which introduced the new national curriculum proposal. I was excited by this, as it appeared to fit in nicely with my vision for an effective curriculum. The proposed curriculum at the conference was based around developing key skills. At the conference, I was directed towards a curriculum developer, Chris Quigley, whose curriculum mirrored the new national curriculum proposal. He had developed a framework which identified a summary of key skills. This meant that the number of national curriculum objectives were reduced and planning could focus on the process rather than the content, freeing up the context for teachers and children to decide. This would enable teachers and children to have ownership of the curriculum. This seemed like a perfect way to get my teacher’s on board with my vision.  We could build on and link the children’s learning as there was a clear progression of skills outlined in Chris Quigley’s design. This led me to book and attend a course run by Chris Quigley in the summer of 2010, which reinforced my belief in the suitability of the Key Skills Curriculum to significantly improve children’s learning at my school. 

Engagement

From previous experience, I knew that I needed to get the staff involved with the process of designing the curriculum. Therefore, I engaged them from the beginning by facilitating a staff meeting where I shared my vision for the curriculum: to provide a meaningful, child-centred curriculum that has a clear progression of skills to support progress.  All staff were invited to record the learning they wanted a child to leave with, having spent four years in our school. From this information, I categorised their responses into three areas, Knowledge, Skills and Spirit and called these our school priorities. I then linked these priorities to a medium term planning template based on Chris Quigley’s Key Skills Curriculum. This was then presented at a follow up session with staff where I referenced the school priorities created by them, and explained how we could ensure these were delivered in order to have the biggest impact on the children’s learning. By using Chris Quigley’s progression of skills, I demonstrated how our priorities linked to the key skills and gave them examples of how a term’s planning might look. Although it would only be Key Stage One using the framework, I wanted to ensure that everyone in the school, including Nursery and Reception teachers, understood the thinking behind the change and that their input had been incorporated. I also felt that the curriculum complemented the Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum and that there would now be a smoother transition between both phases of learning. 

Planning and Delivery

The next stage was dependent on the Key Stage One teachers. They needed to develop their planning around the key skills and our school priorities. I ensured all resources were accessible on the shared area on the school intranet. This included the presentations I had given during the staff meetings and example plans. I was directly involved with the Year Two planning of the Key Skills Curriculum, as I was teaching that year group and could see any advantages or disadvantages of the change. In addition, I frequently spoke to the Year One teachers and looked at their planning with them, to discuss what was working and what wasn’t. We then worked together to adapt the planning templates so that they were more fit for purpose. All teachers were enthusiastic at the planning stage, and this followed through to the actual delivery of the curriculum, which we felt increased the children’s interest in learning. 

Post implementation

We continued planning and delivering the Key Skills Curriculum for the next two years. I felt that it had been a successful implementation that would sustain. After the third year however, I moved on to another London Preparatory school as an Assistant Head to further develop myself as a leader. I remained in contact with the teachers at my previous school and therefore learnt through a casual conversation that they had stopped using the Key Skills Curriculum. The planning format we used as our medium term plan, which was based around Chris Quigley’s Key Skills Curriculum had been abolished. 

LESSONS LEARNT