By Jaya Carrier & Ruhina Cockar
On Monday 6th June during T6 INSET, Ruhina and I attended a training run by B11 entitled ‘Be your school’s resident Ofsted inspector’. Ofsted readiness is something that we need to be mindful of, both in terms of a likely inspection, but also because it enables us to look at ways of improving our school more generally. As such, this course provided us with some really useful insights into how Ofsted use their revised 2019 framework to conduct inspections and how these can support our ongoing work. Here are some of the key things we’ve taken away:
- Curriculum - what are we learning?: The Ofsted 2019 framework takes seriously the ‘what’ of the curriculum and asks educators to make very deliberate and considered decisions around curriculum rationale, sequencing, breadth, depth, and also what students need to know in order to have a successful future life.
- Curriculum - quality assurance: As a stand-alone Academy, questions of quality assurance in our curriculum will also be important - how do we benchmark and what do we use to do this? How can we show that we are offering something even better than the National Curriculum at KS3 and KS4 (where relevant)?
- Teaching and Learning - linked to the curriculum: Ofsted’s view is that decisions about teaching and learning should first and foremost reflect the curriculum. Choices of activities and pedagogies should directly reflect the ‘what’ of the curriculum.
- ‘Knowing more and remembering more’: A large proportion of the evidence base for an inspector is likely to be speaking to students themselves. They will want to know what students can remember, and how students can link this to what they are currently learning. They have routinely stated that they want students ‘knowing more and remembering more’.
Thanks for that summary Jaya. The emphasis on student conversations is interesting: It's normal in IB or IB-influenced schools to want students to be discuss their learning and where it falls in the *sequence* of learning (i.e. the curriculum), in fairly general terms. But that's not the same as students being able to give detailed explanations of their subject curricula, which seems to be an expectation emerging anecdotally from Ofsted visits this year.
ReplyDeleteThe "hierarchy" of curriculum *then* pedagogy (the *what* before the *how* certainly echoes the "Understanding by Design" approach of Wiggins & McTighe. And before them, Marzano was advocating for a "guaranteed and viable curriculum" (see for example https://blog.eduplanet21.com/2018/08/16/three-key-elements-to-creating-a-coherent-guaranteed-and-viable-curriculum).
So it's very interesting to me that Ofsted has adopted that emphasis for this latest framework. Thanks again.