Webheath Academy Primary School

The government have allocated us funds to help support make up for lost school time.  We are evaluating the curriculum and assessing content missed, taught remotely or not embedded to evaluate our offer to our children at Webheath.  We envisage this recovery will take time but will start from March 8th 2021.

Our first steps:

Decide what to reteach and what to let go

For all aspects of the curriculum that were missed teachers decide whether to:

1. Edit curriculum content down so it can be recapped in a few weeks, or

2. Not recap this content (or only touch on it lightly)

We are busy dividing our curriculum into:

1. Non-negotiable key concepts, knowledge and skills all pupils need to understand

2. Deeper concepts and knowledge you'd like pupils to learn if there's time (i.e. if you master the key concepts quicker than expected)

3. Details that are a bonus for pupils to learn, but aren't necessary for a good level of understanding (if pupils master 1 and 2 in the time you have, you can dip into these)

We'll have to make trade-offs and tough decisions.

We have been lucky enough to watch a delivered speech by Mary Myatt and are using her guiding principles:

Guiding principles from Mary Myatt to help you consolidate your curriculum

• Don't try to reteach every lesson pupils missed. The whole school population is in the same boat – everyone is losing at least 4 months of education and no school will be able to reteach every lesson pupils missed

• Focus on what you can control, including smartly planned curriculum coverage and sensitive, high-quality teaching

• For most subjects, pupils aren't only taught something once – concepts reappear across Key Stages and are built on over time, e.g. if year 1 missed gathering and recording data in science, they will do this again in year 2; if year 2 missed this they will have done it in year 1

• Think in terms of key concepts that run through your curriculum, rather than specific topics or units: as long as your curriculum is sequenced properly, there will be main threads running through it, e.g. a unit on ancient Greece and a unit on the Magna Carta are linked by the concept of 'democracy' 

• Focus on the most important, threshold concepts: pupils just need to understand enough of these concepts in order to access the next stage of their learning. Not knowing all the small details won't hold them back

• Pupils are entitled to a broad, balanced curriculum: teaching all subjects will help them get back on track (e.g. vocabulary they learned in history will impact overall learning), so don't sacrifice foundation subjects to prioritise core ones

• Dedicate time to this work, but be mindful of staff workload: you don’t want to replace or rewrite your existing curriculum if you’ve already thought it through and it’s working for your pupils. Consider dropping meaningless marking and excessive data collection so teachers can focus on thoughtful lesson planning, and accurately assessing where pupils are - and avoid burn-out

Taken from 'The curricullum: gallimaufry to coherence' Mary Myatt