Design a DCF Strategy

Roles and responsibilities need to be clearly defined in this section.

Here are some questions to consider:

• What role will the headteacher and senior leadership team take?

• What is expected of the digital leader? What are the specific duties?

• Is it clear who has overall responsibility for the strategy i.e. the owner of the strategy, and who is responsible for managing the strategy i.e. who will lead the actions that need to be taken?

• Who is responsible for leading the monitoring and evaluation of the strategy? How will the school leadership support the digital leader with this?

• How much extra time will the digital lead have off the timetable to undertake the role?

In this section you will need to clearly define your expectations.

Suggestion:

Some schools use a method of setting a 'minimum expectation'. This means that you turn the target baseline into something measurable. To do this, you would need to set an expectation for each strand of the Framework.

This can be an effective method if managed and implemented correctly, but an important element to consider is that if you follow this method and fail to achieve the target baseline, you'll be at risk of failing to implement your strategy successfully.

For example, you might set the following expectations for each year group:

• Citizenship - at least 4 activities per academic year

• Interacting and collaborating - at least 6 activities per academic year

• Producing - at least 6 activities per academic year

• Data and computational thinking - at least 4 activities per academic year

This target baseline will be adjusted regularly to make sure you have struck a balance between being ambitious and achievable. The digital leader would need to carefully manage the implementation of this, ensuring that the activities are of a high standard, where digital competence is used to improve learning and outcomes in each subject. It's also important to consider and plan for progression, in order to allow a sufficient level of challenge that progressively develops learners' skills.

With digital competence being a mandatory element of the Curriculum for Wales, you need to decide on a model to allow the skills to be taught.

Where are literacy skills taught? Where are numeracy skills taught? Are these possibly in language and mathematics lessons?

Where will digital skills be taught?

There are several options for this:

Disciplinary IT model – This is a traditional model where learners have regular IT lessons where they are taught digital skills which will then be applied across the curriculum.

Hybrid model - This model is a mix between IT lessons and the integration of the IT teacher into other lessons to support the application of specific skills. e.g. The IT teacher will support the geography teacher to create a database in their lesson.

Integrated model - In this model all teachers are responsible for teaching and applying the skill. In this model there would be less, and in some cases, no IT lessons.

Which model will you be using?

In this section you will explain your processes for planning digital tasks. Additional focus should be placed here on how you intend to plan for progression in digital skills.

You should also include details of a mapping process if you intend to develop this element. It's important that you explain the purpose of this mapping process i.e. to ensure that all aspects of digital competence are developed, or to ensure consistency in high quality tasks across all Areas of Learning and Experience.

What aspects will you monitor in order to evaluate the effectiveness of your strategy and their impact on standards?

Suggestion

You may want to consider the following:

• Pupil standards

• Breadth of experiences

• The quality of the planning

• Progression in learning

• Confident, creative and ethical digital citizens

In this section you will set out what the journey towards achieving the goals of the strategy will look like. You may want to select key points in time and explain how the growth points will have developed by then.

Suggestions:

• You can use the end of each term as a point to set milestones during the strategy period.

• Another option would be to set milestones every 6 months during the strategy period.

• At each milestone you should explain how the growth points will have developed.

• Try to include information about how the pupil's experience will have developed.

In this section you will plan your monitoring, evaluation and review activities with reference to your growth points.

Suggestions:

• Determine clear enquiry questions to ensure focus for the monitoring exercises. For example, one monitoring activity may focus specifically on the breadth of experiences provided. The next enquiry may focus on evidence of progression in skills.

• Make sure you specify the method of conducting the enquiry. i.e. learning walk, scrutiny of work, discussions with the learners etc.