Curriculum for Wales

What do we mean by progression ?

Response and Reflection

As a team, school, or within a cluster, think about how might define progression for :

Your learners
Your curriculum design

Also consider in what ways you would want to see learners make progress.

Progression may be defined as:

Moving forward
Improving
Gaining depth and breadth in learning
Increasing sophistication
Transferring and applying

In what do we want our learners to make progress?

What learners know (knowledge)
What they understand (understanding)
What learners can do (skills)
Their capacity
Their attributes and dispositions

'Progression in learning is a process of developing and improving in skills, knowledge and understanding over time. This focuses on understanding what it means to make progress in a given area or discipline as learners increase the depth, breadth and sophistication of their knowledge and understanding, skills and capacities, and attributes and dispositions.'

Curriculum for Wales

We can clearly see these ideas reflected in the definition of progression as provide in the CfW guidance. Therefore, when planning for learning you will need to support your learners to increase their knowledge, to deepen understanding and to improve their skills, but also support them to develop their capacities , attributes and dispositions.

Response and reflection

How do we support our learners to become more effective lifelong learners as they progress along the 3-16 continuum?

There are 27 statements of what matters in all and these represent the sum of what learners need to know and understand when they leave compulsory education. They are the fundamentals of each Area and all learning must link back to them. The principles of progression provide a higher level of understanding for practitioners on how learners progress. The descriptions of learning articulate how learners should progress within each statement of what matters. They are arranged in five progression steps which form the continuum of learning.

What is a ‘shared understanding of progression’?

Developing a shared understanding of progression means that practitioners, collectively within their school or setting, across their cluster, and with other schools beyond their cluster together explore, discuss and understand:

their joint expectations for how learners should progress and how knowledge, skills and experiences should contribute to this in schools’ and settings’ curricula
how to ensure coherent progression for learners throughout their learning journey and in particular at points of transition
how their expectations for progression compare to those of other schools and settings.

Curriculum for Wales

Where do we start to develop the shared understanding of progression?

In order to develop a shared understanding of progression in learning, we need to start with the Principles of Progression.

The principles of progression provide a mandatory requirement of what progression must look like for learners.

They are designed to be used by practitioners to:

understand what progression means and should look like in a given Area
develop the curriculum and learning experiences to enable learners to progress in the ways described
develop assessment approaches which seek to understand whether this progress is being made.

Looking at these statements more closely it may be beneficial to simplify the language and reflect on their meaning.

The column in yellow in the table above, is one interpretation of the principles that you may find helpful when engaging in professional dialogue across the school and between schools and may help to secure a common understanding and common language around progression.

Developing a shared understanding of progression

As you read through each Principle of Progression in turn you may start to pick out key phrases and language that helps to identify what progression in learning may look like. Highlighting or underlining key phrases in each of the principles, in teams or in clusters, will help to start the process of developing a shared understanding of progression.

Being effective

Increasing effectiveness as a learner:

As learners make progress within this Area, they will be asking increasingly sophisticated enquiry questions. They will show a greater independence in finding suitable information, making informed predictions and hypotheses, and making judgments including about reliability and utility. They will also become more able to effectively work with others, especially, but not limited to, taking part in social action.

Knowledge

Increasing breadth and depth of knowledge:

Progression in the Humanities Area is demonstrated by learners engaging with an increasing breadth and depth of knowledge and underlying concepts. Learners increasingly develop the capacity to organise and make links across propositional knowledge, to identify and develop more powerful concepts related to the area of study, and to make supported judgements in more complex contexts.

Learners connect new ideas and information to knowledge acquired from previous learning from within and outside school and use it to build an increasingly clear and coherent understanding of the world around them.

Understanding

Deepening understanding of the ideas and disciplines within Areas:

Progression within this Area is demonstrated in the early stages as learners experience holistic approaches to exploring the world around them and are supported in shaping an understanding of themselves in the world. Learners will move on to more focused awareness of the lives of others, in their own social context, elsewhere in the world and in different eras. As they move through the continuum of learning, learners have an increased understanding of the defining features of the constituent disciplines (including history; geography; religion, values and ethics; business studies and social studies) and how these can be brought together to provide different lenses through which to view issues and address questions or problems.

Skills

Refinement and growing sophistication in the use and application of skills:

As learners experience, understand and apply increasingly complex concepts, they show an increasing accuracy and fluency in using a variety of skills identified in the descriptions of learning and statements of what matters.

As they progress, learners will be continually refining and developing a growing sophistication of key disciplinary skills, including those relating to enquiry such as framing questions and using evidence to construct and support an answer, and relating that to representation and interpretation of enquiry results. Progression in this Area is demonstrated through an ability to work with an increasing number and sophistication of sources of information, and a growing understanding of how to resolve contradictory or conflicting accounts.

Application

Making connections and transferring learning into new contexts

Progression in this Area is also characterised through more sophisticated use of relevant skills and the growing ability to transfer existing skills and knowledge into new, and increasingly unfamiliar contexts. As learners progress, they will be able to make links within and between periods and places, identifying similarities and differences, changes and continuities, and use the understanding of concepts to identify connections between new and previous learning. With greater understanding of the world, of other people and their values, in different times, places and circumstances, of their environment and how it has been shaped, learners will demonstrate greater ability to influence events by exercising informed and responsible citizenship.

Response and reflection

You may find it useful to now examine each of the principles of progression and their associated rationale for Humanities in more depth as a school team / department / cluster.

This is an example of a completed version of the activity.

You may find other aspects pertinent to your learners and settings.

This may be useful to inform discussion at school / department / cluster level.

Why is a shared understanding of progression important for the curriculum?

Coherence - to ensure that learners’ experiences are joined-up, authentic and relevant and also helps to plan how to sequence learning effectively.
Smooth transitions - to ensure the best possible transitions within and between settings and primary schools and primary and secondary school for learners. Schools and settings should understand what and how learners have been learning, what and how they will be learning and what their next steps in learning should be to support their education and well-being.
The pace and challenge of expectations - exploring whether their expectations for learners are sufficiently challenging and realistic.

How should schools and settings develop a shared understanding of progression?

Within all schools and settings.
Within each cluster - to support coherence of approaches to progression between primary schools, between primary and secondary schools and around points of transition.
Where possible involving other schools or settings beyond the cluster. Secondary schools in particular should participate in professional dialogue with other secondary schools to support collaboration and coherence across secondary providers.
Between schools and settings, involving school collaboration with funded non-maintained settings, PRUs and other EOTAS providers with whom they have relationships.

Response and reflection

Use the Principles of Progression table above in this reflection.
Consider a 'thread' of learning that you have identified from the statements of what matters for Humanities. A 'thread' of learning is the learning that you have selected from the statements of what matters that will run through the 3-16 continuum of learning.
Next consider the principles of progression that may be observed through this learning.
Finally, working in teams or within a cluster, discuss how the learners might be progress in that learning with a focus on the identified principle. Record your discussions in a table such as the one below.

Activity

Example

How can we share our understanding of progression?

You may want to consider how you will capture this progression in order to be able to share it with others within your school and cluster.

The image below could be one way to represent this progression. In this example the 'thread' of selected learning is cause and effect.

Starting with early learning the learner may start to understand the personal effect they have on their environment or locality and develop this understanding through exploration and play in the outdoor environment. Further learning builds on this understanding and the learner may start to explore these ideas at a national scale and in a more abstract way. They may also look at the interaction between people and place and place and people. Later on this learning would develop to be able to offer explanations for these interactions and the learner may have experiences so that this learning can be understood at a range of scales and from different time periods. They are become more sophisticated in their explanations, and start to make links within and between periods and places, identifying similarities and differences, changes and continuities. In this final circle we can see how the learner may now be able to offer solutions and provide explanations that describe the interconnections. They will be able to deal with new information and make links across their learning.

We have used circles in this representation to show how the learning may build over time for an individual learner. We have also made reference to how the principles of progression could apply here. This is an example and not an exhaustive list.

Next steps

Reflect on your understanding of progression and how it is articulated in your curriculum
Identify threads of learning and consider progression along those threads
Work with practitioners in your school, cluster, and where possible other similar schools, to develop a shared understanding of progression
Think about how this shared understanding might be captured and shared with others

Here's a video that consolidates this page that you may want to use for training purposes.

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