Navigating My NPQSL Journey

 By Rebecca Denis

Joining the 2025/26 NPQSL cohort marked another significant chapter in my leadership journey. At WA, I have often found myself balancing a "head versus heart" leadership approach, weighing systems and accountability against empathy and relationships. The NPQSL framework has helped reconcile these perspectives, shifting my thinking from short-term operational management towards strategic, long-term leadership. By embedding evidence-informed practice into my everyday decision-making, it has challenged me to think more critically about how leadership decisions drive student outcomes and inspire students to become lifelong learners.

A central pillar (module 2) of the NPQSL framework focuses on Curriculum and Assessment, reinforcing the responsibility of senior leaders to ensure assessment design is aligned to curriculum intent and long-term progression. Driven by this principle, my strategic project this year sought to address a school-wide change: improving how we assess, track and measure progress across the Arts, Health and Performance faculty through the development of a cumulative assessment model.

This initiative was designed in response to curriculum changes and longstanding inconsistencies in assessment practices. My aim was to establish a coherent framework in AHP that recognised the unique nature of practical subjects whilst providing robust and meaningful measures of progress.

One of the most important lessons I have learned through NPQSL is that change should never be implemented for its own sake. The NPQSL implementation framework, closely aligned with the EEF guidance on implementation, highlights that sustainable improvement depends on identifying a genuine priority, understanding the root causes of a problem, and carefully managing the stages of implementation.

At WA, analysis of historic progress measures, legacy academic outcomes and assessment practices highlighted warranted intervention. In response, the Curriculum and Assessment Leadership Team introduced a structured cumulative assessment approach. Unlike traditional assessments that focus solely on recently taught content, cumulative assessments evaluate learning over an extended period, promoting retrieval practice, strengthening long-term retention and helping to counter the forgetting curve.

However, it quickly became apparent that an assessment model that works effectively in knowledge-rich subjects such as Maths, History or Science cannot simply be transferred into practical disciplines without adaptation. This became a key leadership challenge for me to consider.

Implementing cumulative assessment within Arts, Health and Performance subjects required me to rethink what cumulative learning looks like in skill-based subjects. Rather than focusing solely on factual recall, we sought to assess cumulative skill development, application and transfer. Drawing on the NPQSL themes of Organisational Effectiveness and Professional Development, I worked closely with AHP middle leaders and subject specialists to design evidence-informed approaches tailored to each discipline.

In PE, we adopted a Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) framework. Rather than treating sports as isolated units, we developed a spiral curriculum where transferable motor skills and tactical concepts are deliberately revisited and reassessed across different activities. For example, decision-making and movement principles developed in invasion games are revisited in later units, promoting the transfer of learning.

In Music, informed by Bruner's theory of spiral progression, we developed portfolio-based assessments that gradually increased in complexity. Core skills such as rhythm, composition and performance are revisited through increasingly demanding musical contexts and genres.

In Art, we formalised the use of visual journals as cumulative portfolios. Students are assessed on their ability to develop, refine and connect techniques across different mediums, demonstrating progression over time rather than producing isolated outcomes.

To improve consistency across the faculty, we standardised assessment structures to balance breadth and depth. Effective assessment should evaluate both substantive knowledge, facts, concepts and rules and disciplinary knowledge, including performance analysis, creative decision-making and evaluative judgement.

Each major assessment was therefore structured around three key components:

• 50% recent learning, assessing content taught since the previous assessment window;

• 25% prior learning, revisiting content from earlier in the key stage to strengthen retrieval and retention;

• 25% misconceptions, targeting areas of historical difficulty identified through cohort-level data.

To further support metacognition, every assessment concludes with a structured reflection activity in which students identify areas requiring additional support. This provides teachers with valuable diagnostic information that can inform future curriculum planning and intervention.

Implementation and monitoring have been critical to the project's success. Progress is tracked termly through centralised systems on Arbor and trackers, ensuring consistency and accountability across departments.

Within PE, assessment data is weighted to reflect the nature of the subject: 60% practical performance measured against agreed rubrics, 30% knowledge assessed through targeted quizzes, and 10% standardised fitness measures.

Across the Expressive Arts subjects, student progress is tracked through a clear three-stage model: “Research”, “Develop” and “Refine”. This framework supports students in building subject knowledge, developing technical skills and producing increasingly sophisticated final outcomes.

This project has supported and reshaped my understanding of senior leadership. I have come to recognise that establishing a positive, safe and academically rigorous culture requires more than strong systems alone. It demands clarity of purpose, effective communication and the empowerment of others. By giving middle leaders in AHP the autonomy to interpret and adapt the cumulative assessment framework within their specialist contexts, we have developed an approach that respects the distinctive nature of performance subjects whilst providing the consistency and rigour required at whole-school level.

As I move into the final stages of the NPQSL programme, I look forward to evaluating the long-term impact of this work, continuing to learn from evidence-informed practice and contributing to sustainable school improvement. Ultimately, the goal remains simple: ensuring that every student receives the highest quality education and the opportunity to thrive.

Substantive vs Disciplinary Knowledge

By Joan Assam

In recent years, few debates in education have generated as much thoughtful discussion as that between substantive and disciplinary knowledge, not in terms of whether one is better than the other but rather on their proper balance, sequencing and integration within the curriculum. Substantive knowledge refers to the core content of a subject - the facts, concepts, and information students need to learn. Disciplinary knowledge, by contrast, focuses on how knowledge is created within a subject - the methods of enquiry, ways of thinking, and processes used to construct understanding. In simple terms, substantive knowledge is the “what” while disciplinary knowledge is the “how” and the “why”. 

While at first this may appear as a deeply academic, very abstract debate rather unsuitable for the purpose of this blog,  in reality its implications are very practical, influencing how we plan lessons, design curricula and shape how our students come to understand the world. In fact, as a Geography teacher, this debate plays out every time I make a decision, and while Geography sits uniquely at the intersection of science and humanities, the lessons from this debate extend well beyond my subject.  I hope that this post, through exploring some of the benefits of the integration of both substantive and disciplinary knowledge within lessons,  provides you with some ‘food for thought’ or even better, reignites a conversation within your department about the space which substantive and disciplinary knowledge occupy within your fields. 

For some time now, one could argue, classrooms and teachers alike have swung between the extremes, prioritising one over the other. Some have emphasised the need for knowledge acquisition, feeling that if they focused too much on disciplinary thinking, their students would lack core knowledge. In contrast, others have prioritised skills and independent thinking, believing that if they prioritised content, they would neglect critical thinking. Unfortunately, this sort of approach risks creating a false dichotomy, for in reality students need both and, crucially, they need them intertwined. To demonstrate this, let’s talk through some examples.

In Geography, my subject, teaching students that Rio de Janeiro is a coastal city in Brazil with significant inequality (substantive knowledge) is insufficient without also helping them understand how we measure inequality, why interpretations differ, and how reliable different sources are (disciplinary knowledge). In other words, substantive knowledge is insufficient without the addition of ideas rooted in disciplinary knowledge, which is why these two ideas are taught hand-in-hand.

In Science, substantive knowledge consists of laws, theories and processes and disciplinary knowledge experimental design, interpreting evidence and even understanding uncertainty. Here, a student who memorises formulas without understanding how scientific knowledge is tested, is missing the essence of the subject. Therefore, as argued above, both types of knowledge need to be intertwined to ensure the best outcomes for our students. 

Finally, in English, substantive knowledge can take the form of the learning of different texts, vocabulary and even literary devices whereas disciplinary knowledge concerns interpreting meaning, analysing language and constructing arguments. A student who can identify a metaphor but cannot explain its effect is only, arguably, halfway there. 

What this all shows us, is that across all subjects, disciplinary knowledge when intertwined with substantive knowledge,transforms students from passive recipients into active thinkers. This is important, because students who only acquire substantive knowledge may perform well on recall-based tasks but struggle to apply or question information. In contrast, students who develop disciplinary understanding think more critically about the world, question assumptions, engage with complexity and even transfer their thinking across contexts. In short, ensuring both types of knowledge are present within our classrooms teaches students skills which will not only serve them well in exams, but in the world at large. In a world of abundant information - and of course misinformation - this is essential. Ensuring the intertwining of both types of knowledge within my classroom, especially with my GCSE students, has allowed for more rich discussions, the questioning of big ideas as well as a tremendous improvement in the quality of written work. 

Of course, entwining both can pose its challenges even for those who recognise its merits, not least due to time constraints. However, we must look beyond this and remind ourselves of the ambition we all share, regardless of subject and discipline, the ambition of not just teaching students what is known, but inducting students into how knowledge is created, tested, and understood. If we keep this goal in mind, the debate becomes less about choosing sides and more about designing classrooms where knowledge and thinking grow together.

References & Further Reading

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/research-review-series-geography/research-review-series-geography#disciplinary-knowledge 

https://geography.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/GA-Curriculum-Framework-2022-WEB-final.pdf