Week 3

According to OfSTED's (2019) Education Inspection Framework, what should an effective school curriculum contain?

According to OfSTED’s (2019) Education inspection framework, an effective school curriculum should be ambitious and designed to give all learners, in particular the most disadvantaged and those with special needs. It should give the knowledge and cultural capital they need to succeed in life. The curriculum extends beyond the academic, technical or vocational. It provides for learner’s broader development, enabling them to develop and discover their interests and talents. It is also essential that the curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning and employment. 

How can a school curriculum incorporate an understanding of working memory?

When a child learns new information it goes into their working memory. If the information is not repeated and looked over again within 15/20 minutes the information will begin to fade. For the information to be transferred to the long term memory it has to be regularly looked over or reminded of. The understanding of working memory can be incorporated into a curriculum by giving the children refresher tasks that last around 10 minutes of the things they learned the day before, then the week before, then the month before. \this is a good method of retaining information for a long time and having a mastery approach to learning. 

How do maths hubs support schools?

The core purpose of the Maths Hubs Programme, coordinated by the NCETM, is to help schools and colleges lead improvement in mathematics education in England. They seek to harness all the maths leadership and expertise within an area, to develop and spread excellent practice, for the benefit of all pupils and students. They are part of the wider development of school-led system leadership in England. All hubs encourage schools in the areas they serve to get in touch to find out more about the CPD and other activities they offer. Each year, there are projects that are available nationwide through Work Groups in every hub. Some Work Groups are unique to particular hubs.

At your school, investigate: topics and themes used by school for curriculum delivery, how the curriculum is organised/delivered, e.g. rolling programmes. Also, investigate summative data that has been published by the school, e.g. Phonics screening data, SATs data.

When looking at Nicol Mere’s section of their curriculum statement, one of the first things you see is the quote “learning is a passport to life”. An optimistic quote like that is very enlightening to see as alongside talking about the values of their curriculum this adds to how highly they view it. They have designed their curriculum to consider and reflect on many different things including:

• Their school values.

• The national curriculum

• Knowledge 

• Progressive skills

• Sequenced learning

• Pedagogy and needs of the children.

• Changes needed based on monitoring and many more…

Key stage 1 and 2 are taught in set classes with a small class size. Every year group has a focused catch-up support group to help pupils gain the knowledge and skills to become successful readers, writers and mathematicians. They view their outside environment as an additional classroom as it gives further opportunities for l

Lecture Notes

Working memory

Children develop their knowledge from what they know before school, they will have separate concepts which they will be able to put together as they get older. 

Long term memory is infinite, working memory is finite, we take in information and we process it in our working memory, we then store some of this information in our long term memory, our brain cleverly builds schemas which can be brought back into our working memory.

Schemas are built using links or cues to prior knowledge. The brain builds upon schemas so that more 'powerful knowledge' can be easily accessed again and again.

Brain is wired to avoid difficulty so our working memory is relatively limited around 15/20 mins. to increase capacity of working memory the brain needs to be fed information that it can link (schemas) visual aids (process pictures 1000 times faster than words) chunk new information (not present too much at once). Reduce extraneous load (distraction) volcanoes. 

The impact of focusing on the 15/20 minutes has allowed better retention of powerful knowledge, a streamlined essential curriculum, reduction of extraneous load and teacher focus upon being the expert.