DEMAT
The Diocese of Ely Multi-Academy Trust (DEMAT) is a large Trust, with 39 primaries across Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Peterborough, and Suffolk. Tricia Moss is the Curriculum Lead for the Trust.
Our Trust is extremely varied; all our schools are in the East of England, but we range from large junior schools to small, village primaries with up to four year groups in one class! Despite these apparent differences, we ensure that all our decisions are centred around our Trust values and curriculum and pedagogical principles. We believe all children are entitled to a knowledge-rich curriculum where the knowledge is valued, specified, well-sequenced and taught to be remembered. This is too important for our children to be left to the chance of having a knowledgeable, experienced teacher or curriculum leader in a school. The highest quality of curriculum had to be the entitlement, not the hope, of all our children, bar none.
We knew from the outset that if we wanted to embed a knowledge-rich curriculum across all our schools, we would need to ensure that our headteachers and teachers all had the knowledge that they would need to engage in rich and meaningful curriculum conversations. Just as we need to ensure our pupils have sufficient substantive knowledge in a curriculum discipline to be able to engage meaningfully in the disciplinary knowledge and subsequent conversations and interrogations of their knowledge, we needed to do the same for our staff. In other words, we wanted to ensure that we were all able to join the same speech community, as E.D. Hirsch would say. We had the potential to create large subject communities, with experienced teachers working across the Trust, but we couldn’t build these communities before our subject leaders had essential curriculum and pedagogical knowledge themselves.
We identified that we not only needed support with planning a curriculum, but also that continuing professional development would be key to our success. From the offset, we wanted to find someone to partner with as we knew that it had be a two-way process where we could have those important curriculum conversations together. We spent time reviewing a wide range of curricula and spoke with many curriculum experts who have developed excellent curriculum materials. However, everything that was on offer was presented to us as a ‘pick up and run’ model, with little engagement from us, and few or time-limited opportunities for CPD. With our varied context, it was vital that we found a partner who placed continual curriculum development and CPD at the forefront.
We wanted a partnership where our teachers could engage with the planning and receive support from those responsible for the curriculum who have been through the process of designing and embedding the curriculum in schools. That was what we were able to receive from the Primary Knowledge Curriculum Partnership, and why we chose to partner with them.
We began introducing our schools to the Primary Knowledge Curriculum (PKC) in the Autumn Term, 2020. Introducing a new curriculum during the pandemic was not without it challenges. We launched the curriculum journey with an introduction session for senior leaders. This session was planned collaboratively between us and the PKC team. This is what has been working really well for us; we plan the content together, in true partnership, ensuring our professional development is responsive to the needs of our schools. We then held an introduction to all teachers across the Trust. We didn’t want to dictate to them and force any school to adopt the PKC who was resistant, so we asked any schools who initially said they wanted to plan their own curriculum to still attend the training and use it to reflect on their own curriculum choices. The next thing we did was suggest that schools trial units alongside attending curriculum leadership and subject leadership training. It was essential that we helped our schools to understand the rationale behind the curriculum. This enabled us to get Trust-wide buy in.
In our training sessions we discussed our curriculum principles, why content was chosen in the PKC and how the curriculum builds on knowledge over time. When we planned our sessions, we thought and still think about how we can maximise engagement and impact. Initially, we recorded all sessions so anyone who was not able to attend could catch up later. However, we found that offering schools this option meant that while teachers had the best intentions to watch the videos, it was hard to find the time to do this. Therefore, we made the decision to insist that everyone came to the live events and use this time to really engage in curriculum conversations.
In the spring term we hosted our own subject leader days as a MAT and worked together to unpick all elements of curriculum that had been covered in our PKC sessions. We looked at the overviews, unit rationales, some individual units and lessons. We invested in spending time with our subject leaders to ensure they really understood how the curriculum is structured. Having in-house curriculum expertise is vital to facilitate discussions around what the curriculum looks like in our varied contexts for our pupils. It helps to make curricular choices grounded in our curricular and pedagogical principles.
As at Trust, we have also been looking at Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction. We have led CPD on the theory and research in which the principles are grounded and provided staff meeting materials for schools to explore what they look like in their own context. The PKC planning materials are rooted in Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, so they complement our pedagogical principles and give teachers a clear framework to think deeply about how they will deliver their lessons to their specific pupils. We have worked with our teachers to look at the planning and think about how the principles will facilitate learning for all children. During the training led by the PKC team, we were able to show what Rosenshine’s Principles look like in action, using videos and examples from the curriculum planning.
We also worked with our schools to discuss what PKC looks like in our settings, thinking about our local area. While we advocate fidelity to the curriculum, we ask that all schools add in local elements and think about any adaptations that they may wish to make that may be specific to their school’s needs. Taking the time to think deeply about the principles that underpin our curriculum and pedagogy helps us to think carefully about opportunity-cost when deciding what we do and don’t teach.
We are now in our second year working with the PKC team. This year we are receiving more support on how to plan and enact the PKC in mixed aged classes, and we are continuing to overcommunicate our key curriculum messages. Just as children need to build their schema to move from novice to expert, so do staff. By revisiting content and engaging in retrieval practice during our forums, we are modelling our pedagogical principles for staff and helping them to transfer this core knowledge to their long-term memory. This is giving our subject leaders the confidence and competence to have rich conversations with teachers as they monitor and evaluate the impact of their curriculum specialism. We strongly believe that curriculum conversations should be happening at all levels because we have collective responsibility to provide the very best curriculum to all our pupils.
We are already seeing the success of embedding PKC in our schools. The biggest change our leaders and teachers are reporting is that the children are really remembering what had been taught; they can remember the details, use the taught vocabulary, and engage in conversations with confidence. Also, many of our children are telling us that their PKC lessons are their favourite lesson of the week!
Our teachers find the structure of the PKC lessons really helpful – they reduce cognitive load for children and ensure that there is discrete vocabulary instruction and retrieval practice in every lesson. Our parents have noticed that children are talking more about their learning in these subjects. They have valued us sharing the curriculum overviews and Knowledge Organisers, so they are fully informed about what their children are learning in school.
For any MATs looking to support their schools with curriculum, we would strongly recommend working in partnership with the PKC. Trusts can work with the PKC team to think strategically about buy-in, the specific needs of their schools and plan how they can drive it internally. We need professional dialogue and engagement from our schools and ensure that we collate and act on feedback. The partnership element is key: working collaboratively with the PKC team, our centralised team and our schools. This isn’t an ‘off-the-shelf’ curriculum with some training thrown in. If we want to make real change, we must drive this every day, keep it alive, keep having those conversations and bring everyone along with us. We need to be asking ourselves: what impact is this curriculum having in our schools? How do we know? Is it having the impact we anticipated? Partnering with the PKC keeps these conversations alive and ensures everyone has the knowledge and understanding of curriculum to participate.
Tricia Moss
Curriculum Lead for the Trust