Teachers need a rich and complex diet of professional development, support and opportunity if they are to fully realise their potential. Empowering staff to play a key role in school improvement and development is a major part of that diet.
Here at Warrington Primary Academy Trust (WPAT)—a MAT of six primary schools and a teaching school in Cheshire—we’re placing a great emphasis on the empowerment of teachers alongside a rich mix of CPD, mentoring and coaching.
This approach is coming to fruition in two main areas: school improvement and curriculum development.
Empowering staff to lead curriculum development
The introduction of a new Ofsted framework with a range of new key judgements—including a ‘quality of education’ measure that focuses on what is intended to be learned through the curriculum, how well it is taught and assessed, and the impact it has on learners—created a fresh impetus for us to begin building a brand new curriculum for our pupils.
As we know, there is time for schools to develop their curriculum in response to the new framework, so we’ve used the past few months to begin a curriculum review, kicking off with science, geography and history.
Ofsted has said that it will assess curriculum through intent—what leaders intend pupils to learn—as well as implementation and impact. And when they say intent, they mean a curriculum that is ambitious for all pupils, coherently planned and sequenced, successfully adapted, designed and developed for pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities, and one that is broad and balanced for all pupils.
At WPAT, our staff are talking the lead role in helping to create our new curriculum. We’ve made a real investment in subject leadership so that we can work together to provide every one of the 1,900 children in our schools with a curriculum that provided them with exactly the same opportunities.
For me this project provides an example of what can be done in a MAT—it’s about sharing our expertise and our passion and organising ourselves in a way that benefits every school, in terms of what we provide for our children as well as what we do to develop and provide opportunities for our colleagues.