How to Judge the Quality of Education
(And a 10 Point Curriculum Audit)
This is about your purpose. Sure, Ofsted will be very interested in your Q of E, but this is not about them. It’s about you.
Teachers have various reasons for becoming leaders - most are altruistic, socially motivated, focused on personal growth - but these can also be intertwined with ego, status, and anxiety because we are all human.
This is why your individual purpose will never fully match that of your team, or the other leaders in school.
So how do you get everyone aligned, rowing in the same direction, singing from the same hymn sheet and skating, hand in hand, over well worn metaphors?
It’s All About Progress
Maybe you care about exam results, or life chances and skills, or character education, or creativity, or teamwork - you’re a secondary school, or primary, or a special school, or an alternative provision - this advice will work for all of you.
List the things that you care about, that you are passionate that your students should make progress in.
Start at the End
What is it that a successful student will do? Answer this without reference to any exam.
Do this for everything on your list.
As an illustrative example, you might want to develop student character.
A Character Curriculum
Define what you mean by X - in this case ‘character’ - it could have been anything on your list. Let’s say my students will be successful in developing character when they:
learn from failure,
work for the greater good of others by volunteering,
take responsibility for their environment,
participate in a range of extra curricular activities,
etc, etc.
Ok, that’s my intent.
But what must students do?
Let’s take an aspect of character - ‘learning from failure’, (and then we’ll look at the academic curriculum - 2 examples I hope you can transfer to any school, subject or context).
You have to list these things, and count them.
For example, how will they ‘learn from failure’? I have to make sure that this is not some airy fairy aspiration, but an inevitable consequence of what the students do in the curriculum.
I could decide that each unit will begin with a pre-test of knowledge students have not yet been taught. (This improves long term memory and later learning, and is called the pre-testing effect). But it also requires students to accept that getting really low scores is part of learning, and not a judgement on them (unless they refuse to make progress).
I could give students models of completed work that is just beyond their capabilities, and ask them to recreate their own versions (which will always be better than they could do without the model, but always fall short of the model itself).
Ok - now count these. How many such models will be in a unit of work to make sure students experience this often enough.
I could display student work at random under the visualiser to teach from whatever is there - success or failure - and turn any failure into a learning moment. If I want this in every lesson, I might stipulate this in the resources, or on the PPT slide.
I could ask each head of department to adapt this to their curriculum. And let’s imagine they all do.
Let’s Count
We will all default to our personal settings. Sure, the curriculum might say we will do all this, but you don’t agree with part of it, and some of it feels hard, so you do the things you prefer.
This thing in your curriculum is not your thing, so you water it down with your own lukewarm enthusiasm, and divert it with your passion for something else. Whose gonna know?
The assessments will know. Keep the score.
I can count the number of pre-tests.
I can count the scores.
Count the scores in the assessment at the end of the unit. Measure the difference to see if the unit delivered the progress we want or expected.
Compare classes to find teachers who have achieved more, and puzzle out what they do. Put this on the agenda once per half term, for every department.
Count the number of models in the booklet for that unit. Then take in the class books - or do this as a team - and count how many students have imitated the models. Compare the classes again. Put this on the agenda once per half term for every department.
Maybe you’ve introduced green pen response to feedback from the visualiser. Count those in books too, at the same time you look at models. Compare classes.
Whatever you count will improve. Whenever you count things together in your team, teachers will both want to improve and see how to do it from those who are succeeding.
Extra Curricular Curriculum to Develop Character
I know that if I make students experience a range of activities, many of these will be outside their comfort zone. They will feel a sense of failure because of this, or because they are not as good as others.
So I create an extra curricular curriculum with this range, in which student will inevitably learn from failure.
I could give them a passport - each year they might have to tick off 3 different extra curricular activities, which you can define in the school in advance. Sports participation, public speaking, performing in assembly or a video, exhibiting art, or a drama piece, interviewing a grandparent or stranger, publishing an article, litter picking, visits to a theatre, to a museum, to a mountain top - you’ll come up with scores of ideas. Put them in a list for each year group. Ask students - or make students - tick off a minimum number each year.
Compare tutor groups by their passport scores. Find out how some tutors get their students to take on so much more - spread the expertise by interviewing them and some of their tutees, putting it on a pastoral meeting agenda three times a year.
Specify the number of assemblies where this will be the focus, and calendar them in advance.
Once you count what you want, what you want happens.
The Academic Curriculum
Exactly the same process will happen with your subject expertise. Make a list of everything students will need to be good at, what they will actually do.
Example: You are a historian, and you want your students to be able write an essay in which they weigh up contradictory evidence and come to a conclusion. Ok, how many times will they need to practise that before you think they will be really good at it. 5, 10, 20 times?
Now look at your curriculum - if it is 12 times, will those 12 fit into year 10 and 11, or will you need to start earlier?
20 times? Ok, you probably need to start in year 7.
Map them across the curriculum. Mark them - keep the scores. Compare how classes do.
Now you need as many models, so that each time students understand what they need to produce to do well - they need to go into the curriculum too - you can count them.
Do your need an example of a ‘good’ and an ‘excellent’ for each one? Yes, because every class is mixed ability (even if they are not set that way). Ok, let’s count them.
We can’t create these all at once, so map out who will produce what and when. (Learn to use AI to help you). Steal as many as you can from your assessments, and the exam board.
Make this an agenda item 6 times a year, and ask teachers to bring their models to share at the meeting.
Follow this pattern for everything you need students to do. Story writing, poetry writing, reading of good books, solving quadratic equations, designing and sequencing methods for experiments …
10 Things We Should Audit this way in the Curriculum?
Decide, plan and resource:
What students will actually do in order to be great at your subject - regardless of the exam. (This is actually your intent, but it is not some waffly statement - it is actual things students will get better at, and you’ve counted them).
Model it. Count the number of models you need in each unit and decide how you will teach from these.
Sequence it. Organise it over all key stages - what order will they do these things, in order to make the most progress.
What do you need students to remember? Create knowledge organisers for each unit, with no fluff - just what students absolutely need to know for the exam, or for cultural capital.
How will students be made to remember using the forgetting curve? Map the retrievals and allocate them to homework and in class retrievals as the right intervals. Measure the intervals. Allocate the questions for retrieval.
Assess the impact of your curriculum. Set the pre-tests for each unit. Write knowledge tests not just for each unit, but for long term memory. Map these with the forgetting curve, so they happen at the best intervals.
Do the same with your application/skills assessments, based on your models.
Measure the performance of classes. Calendar this, so you review the best teachers, and identify what parts of each unit need to improve.
Calendar when you will review exercise books for each year group to find out the same.
Perfect Your Explanations. Write these in your team’s PPT slides. Include videos which might do it better - either those from outside sources (GCSEpod, Cognito, Seneca, etc or film your best teachers, or screen record them). Or, you know, YouTube!
Better still, put them in a booklet so students can keep referring back to an explanation, or you can test them on it.
Calendar when you will review what you have learned from learning walks. Improving the curriculum is the number one focus of this - only improve the teacher where things are obviously, and not subjectively wrong.
Agree the teaching techniques which are non negotiable because they will have most impact. (And to stop you being subjective in your judgement of the teacher). If your school does not already have these, do it with your team. Keep the number small (6-10). Here are my suggestions:
cold call, where students are peppered with questions at random.
use the visualiser every lesson, to show students’ work (usually chosen at random). PE and drama can do this live, but they should also film it to refer back to - everyone else, use the visualiser.
silent solo, where students have 10-20 minutes to grapple with something independently.
track the room, where you circulate looking for common misconceptions several times during an activity or silent solo.
narrate what you see. When you track the room, simply say what you are seeing - the number of lines written, steps taken, problems solved - whatever. This establishes the social norm of students doing more each time you circulate, and each student measuring their own effort against that of the rest of the class.
Take each of these 10. I have listed 1-9 of them in the order in which you should tackle them - the order in which I think they will have the most impact.
Allocate them to each year group you teach.
Red/Amber/Green each one. Prioritise them in number order. (I’ll let you decide when to prioritise 10 - you could even make a case for it being number 1).
Worst Case Scenario
You may be a highly anxious, status obsessed ego maniac. But that won’t matter.
The 10 point curriculum audit will make sure that all your teachers thrive and your students make great progress.
If this has been useful, you should subscribe. I send out ideas to help your students make progress every week.
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