Developing Curriculum Intent— A Guide for Senior Leaders

This is a practical guide for senior leaders in schools. It aims to give advice on how to support heads of department in developing the curriculum in their subjects.

The first step is to clarify the intent. Strong departments have a shared sense of what they’re doing this for, a message that ends up being conveyed to students.

It’s easy to dismiss conversations around intent as too high level to be relevant to classroom practice, but without them the education offered by a department tends to fall back on instrumental aims: passing exams, obtaining a place at university, getting a good job.

These are by-products of a good curriculum, not the purpose. They’re easy to measure, however, so they tend to get a lot of focus from senior leaders.

Getting the curriculum right requires leaders to change their mentality. It means thinking less about the quantitative aspect of education, i.e. outcomes, and instead thinking about schooling qualitatively, i.e. in terms of values[1].

The task is therefore to improve the quality of education by thinking more deeply about the curriculum. This task is distinct from improving outcomes.

Step 1 — Curriculum Questions

The first thing I do when working with heads of department is to organise a curriculum intent meeting.

Ahead of this meeting, I share with them a series of questions, influenced by the questions Christine Counsell asks in the ResearchED Guide to the Curriculum. These are designed to prompt reflections on the following themes, amongst others:

• End points being aimed for.
• Starting points of students coming in.
• Nature of knowledge in the subject.
• The relationship between the subject and the academic disciplines.

You can read the full list of questions by clicking here.

I make it clear that I do not expect written answers to these questions. I share them purely to give them a flavour of the kind of things we will be talking about.

Step 2 — Curriculum Grid

The next step is to meet with the head of department. This usually takes around an hour.

During this meeting, I ask them a selection of the questions from the list shared above. There is no need to cover all these questions during the meeting; they are prompts for conversation rather than a comprehensive survey.

As the head of department shares their thoughts, I type up their ideas into a grid. This grid has three headings:

• Everyday understandings — this column maps out how we would expect most of our students to think about our discipline or practice when they enter school.
• General understandings — this column maps out how we would like students to think about our discipline or practice if they cease to study our subject at the end of the compulsory phase, either at the end of Year 9 or Year 11.
• Specialised understandings — this column maps out how we would like students to think about our discipline or practice if they are to pursue further study after they leave us[2].

The aim is to capture what we would like our students to be like when they leave us, whether they will one day specialise further or are studying our subject solely as part of a general education.

Specifying these end points is crucial, yet equally important is specifying the starting points of our students when they join us in Year 7. These comprise the everyday understandings (and perhaps misconceptions), that our curriculum aims to address.

An example of a curriculum grid can be seen below.

Curriculum grid for physics, written by me.

Step 3 — Intent Document

After the meeting with the head of department, I ask them to review their curriculum grid and use the list of questions to add any further thoughts.

Once the grid is completed, they can use it to write a curriculum intent document. This document should answer two main questions:

1. What are the end points we want to achieve through our curriculum? Or, to put it another way, who do we want our students to be by the time they leave us? (The document must articulate both the specialised and the general educational aims described above.)
2. Given the starting points of our students, how will our KS3 teaching look different to that at KS4 and KS5? In what way will we approach each topic differently? How will this move students from their everyday understandings towards the specialised and general ones we’re aiming for?

For an example of an intent document, written by me for physics, click here.

Step 4 — Sharing with the Team

Once the head of department has written their intent document and received feedback, I advise them to share it with their team. Often, they choose to share it with senior members of the department first, before disseminating more widely.

It is worth stating that the purpose of this document is to frame subsequent conversations between heads of department and their teams.

For example, if a member of the team is planning a unit of work, the feedback given by the head of department is likely to refer to the curriculum intent document: “I wasn’t sure about the task you put at the end of this lesson, as it’s more of a KS3 task than a KS4 one.”

Another example might be when giving feedback after observing a lesson: “the way you explained that concept was very abstract. I think you need to do some more concrete examples so that you can change the way students think about this phenomenon.”

The intent document is unlikely to ever be directly relatable to any particular aspect of classroom practice, but it acts as the why of everything teachers in a department do. Consequently, it is a hugely important first step in improving the quality of education in a subject.

Footnotes

[1] My values are liberal. I believe education is the means by which we discover who we are (and how we came to be who we are), in order that we can begin to understand others.

In a personal sense, this is emancipatory. As we come to understand ourselves and the world around us, we are liberated from the preconceptions we assumed were universal and unchanging.

(To put it another way, as we realise that not everyone experiences the world as we do, we may begin to see others as they really are.)

In a political sense, this is essential to the functioning of our democratic system. A liberal democracy only works if people make choices that are right for everyone, rather than merely themselves. This requires citizens to see outside their own immediate worldview, as described above.

All this is important, because the advice I will give in the rest of this blog is based upon these principles. If you think education serves a different purpose — offering a steady supply of graduates to the workforce; providing opportunities for creativity, well-being and play; fomenting the coming revolution — you may not wish to read further.

[2] The general-specialised distinction is important. Subject leaders often overlook the fact that the majority of their students will not go on to become academic biologists or historians, or professional artists, writers or sportspersons.

In most classrooms, we must cater both for those who will wish to pursue our discipline further after they leave us, either at university or in some professional capacity, and for those who won’t.

For the latter group, we have an important political function. We must consider what knowledge of and about our disciplines they must leave us with if they are to become good citizens who can take part in the democratic process.