Monday, June 29, 2009
Ofsted evaluation of how schools have implemented the new secondary curriculum published.
Ofsted concludes schools have been successful in engaging students and introducing new dimensions to teaching and learning through the new curriculum but more needs to be done to create whole school ethos of skill and competency progression.
The Ofsted evaluation report comes after visiting 37 schools implementing the new curriculum between May 2008 and March 09, Inspectors interviewed staff and year seven students as well as observing lessons and reviewing policy documents.
The report concludes that most teachers feel the new framework gives them freedom to be more creative and flexible in their teaching and that most children interviewed were positive about their lessons and learning experiences.
The most successful schools were identified as those who had incorporated the new requirements into a whole school curriculum involving all staff, the less successful school plans introduced the general themes to the whole staff but left the implementation to individual departments.
Ofsted identified that in the implementation of the personal, learning and thinking skills most schools were not implementing them in the best way to achieve the requirement for them to underpin the whole curriculum.
“Although the survey found some outstanding examples of personal, learning and thinking skills underpinning learning across the curriculum, introducing these skills was generally left to subject departments to implement as they saw fit. Even when this was done well, schools usually had little or no knowledge of where the skills were being taught,”.
The evaluation makes clear the expectation from Ofsted that the PLTS should be delivered in an explicit and identifiable way. Schools which listed relevant personal, learning and thinking skills for their lessons plans but did not show how students were given opportunities to demonstrate them were considered not to have met the requirements.
" In the weaker schools, schemes of work listed particular personal, learning and thinking skills without any evidence that how these skills would be used or developed within lessons had been considered. In some cases, the skills were planned into schemes of work and lesson plans, but the opportunities for students to use them were not actually realised in the lesson. Opportunities for students’ development of these skills had rarely been coordinated systematically across all subjects. Students therefore sometimes had many opportunities to develop certain personal, learning and thinking skills, but few opportunities to develop others."
In the very best practice, cross-curricular skills and the whole-curriculum dimensions were key to creating a coherent curriculum in which these aspects underpinned subject knowledge and skills. These schools audited cross-curricular skills and the whole-curriculum dimensions. Consequently, the curriculum had greater coherence and links between subjects were more clearly established.
The report also highlighted the central importance of learners being actively engaged and developing the ability to articulate their own skills development and progression.
"In half the schools visited, students were explicitly aware of their school’s focus on developing their personal, learning and thinking skills, and were able to explain how this provision was helping them to learn more effectively. "
The assessment of the personal, learning and thinking skills was identified as an area of weakness for many schools, only five of the 37 schools had considered how they would assess students’ progress in developing these skills and not all of these were considered as successful by the Ofsted team because "The recording showed only where the skills were used, but not whether students had made progress in them."
Sharing the good practice of the few successful schools in assessing progress in the PLTS, the report concludes:
“A notable feature of the best practice was the increased time teachers gave for students to reflect on their learning and to assess their own progress and that of their peers .”
The report makes a recommendation for schools to audit their curriculum for opportunities for learners to develop personal, learning and thinking skills and to plan to extend opportunities across the curriculum.
For the QCA, the Ofsted recommends they " provide further support to schools to help them to assess students’ progress in developing personal, learning and thinking skills ."
Both the QCA and OFSTED are unable to openly endorse a commercial product such as PbyP but the recommendations of the report appear closely aligned in a number of ways including the advice that schools should implement systems...
- providing clear and explicit progression across all the PLTS
- defining PLTS generically across the whole curriculum
- engaging learners in the process
- providing structured peer assessment and self assessment
- capturing evidence of exactly how criteria were met
To read the Ofsted report in full click here.