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To discuss a topic brought to the fore by Ofsted’s ‘deep dive’ approach, Caroline is joined by Cornerstones founder, Simon Hickton and Curriculum Manager, Catherine Scutt. They explore how to ensure subject coverage, well-sequenced learning and subject progression, and how to do this using Cornerstones’ tools and content. Catherine introduces the new knowledge-rich projects (KRPs) from Cornerstones which take a subject-driven approach, enhanced by meaningful links across the curriculum.
Caroline: Welcome to The Curriculum, a podcast by Cornerstones Education. Here we discuss all things curriculum plus leadership issues, teaching tips, and much, much more. Hello everyone. I’m Caroline Pudner, your host, and today I’m joined by Cornerstone’s founder Simon Hickton and curriculum manager Catherine Scutt. Right now, we’ve come together to discuss something that is extremely important and that is subject coverage and subject progression, but particularly for primary schools, it’s because the light has been shone on primaries really looking at every subject. It’s not just English and maths and the core subjects. This is a bit of a shift and it’s been going on for quite a while. But I think now that the inspection framework is live and schools are starting to be inspected, they are really thinking long and hard about geography, history, science, all the subjects and how children gain skills and knowledge in those subjects throughout their time at primary. So obviously this is a big topic, right? Simon? What do we mean by subject coverage?
Simon: To me and us at Cornerstone’s coverage means the programmes of the study of the national curriculum. Obviously, if you’re in an academy, you don’t have to cover the national curriculum. You can have your own ambitious curriculum that’s of similar quality. But it’s those programmes of study, those bullet points within the national curriculum, those attainment statements, but also the aims that are often missed. So subject coverage are about the aims and the individual bullet points within the national curriculum. And it’s so varied because within the national curriculum you’ve got English and maths, great detail, science, on the whole and not for everything because you’ve got working scientifically, but on the whole it’s in year group, but then you get down to the other subjects geography, history, art and design, etc. and they tend to be very different. I think in art there’s only 7 programmes of study across Key Stage one and Key Stage two. You’ve got more in geography and it makes it very, very difficult to make sure you’ve got this coverage. But that’s the framework. That’s the coverage that is expected. The blueprint, the framework for a school to build their curriculum.
Caroline: Right. And we’ll get on to that later because actually it is key that they build on that, isn’t it? Those subjects need teasing out in a lot more detail.
Simon: And I said coverage there is the key word. So again, what is coverage or coverage is the knowledge, understanding and skills of those subjects. That’s what the coverage is and that’s being laid out in the national curriculum or will be laid out by academies in their own way. And that’s the bare bones, the framework that they’ll then build on.
Caroline: Can they easily get the subject coverage in your opinion?
Simon: Not easily. We’ve obviously the past ten years working with schools, one of the hardest things is fitting everything in. That is huge and it’s so difficult. It has been pretty much said everywhere that we’ve ended up with a narrow curriculum because of English and maths and the importance which it is in, obviously in primary education, teaching children to read, write, speaking and listening, it’s huge, it’s massive, it’s the massive priority. But we’ve got to get that broad and balanced curriculum as well. And to get that broad and balanced curriculum, you’ve got to say, right, okay, let’s look at the subjects individually. But how can we actually connect all of that together? And because the only way for me and a lot of schools do agree with that. And even when you speak with Ofsted inspectors, they say a thematic approach in primary is what works. It has worked and it continues to work very well because that allows you to connect subjects and all that cross connect and the coherence, the connectivity between pedagogy and subject and everything else all comes together. So, you can actually get coverage.
Caroline: Yeah, as long as you can track, I suppose where you’re covering an aspect of geography in maybe a pure geography approach or a lesson and then where you’ve also covered it later on within another theme or context. That child is still covering that aspect.
Simon: That’s definitely right. And when we get on to the progression of subjects, I think later in the podcast we will discuss that and how that coherence and that connectedness really makes that work. So, to go back to the question of the challenges, you can look at subjects and say, right, let’s create and make sure we’ve got this content coverage within a silo of a subject, and that can be done. And you can say, well, the end points what we’re going to look at each year. But then that gets very much complicated by well, yeah, but how does that then fit with another subject and another subject. And how can we fit everything together into the limited time in class that you have actually got? Especially in primaries. And that for me is the biggest sort of challenge. And then how is that linked to all the activities? What’s actually going to be taught? What’s actually going to be learned by the children? So how are we going to deliver this content? Because it’s not just about having the content there. How is it going to be delivered? That’s our intention. And again, the three words that have come out to the fore, intent, implementation and impact very clear. Now Ofsted are stating that that is not three separate sections, it’s a flow because no matter what you intend, what you deliver, you’ve got to actually link together. Has it actually been learned?
Caroline: You’ve got to think about how you’re delivering before you start thinking, yeah, we want to do all that coverage of that and that and that, but how do you actually do it? And I know we’ve done it in our way and we can talk about that in a bit.
Simon: It’s massive, I’ve seen over the last ten years how Mel and her team have struggled with this and fought with it and gone back to the drawing board again and again to produce this coverage and make sure it’s there and interlinked and working and can work the right way through to delivery, as well as just being something on a piece of paper that think, oh, that looks nice. And oh, we’ve got that mapped out now. Yeah, but how is it going to be delivered and how are the children going to learn and how will this actually work in real life.
Caroline: Let’s think about progression now. Maybe I’ll bring Catherine in actually, because Catherine, you have been extremely busy upstairs here working with a team of people designing the, well, new curriculum projects. But you’ve also done a lot of work on our existing ILPs. How do you ensure that children make progress in, say, geography, history in these subject disciplines? What are the things to think about if you’re creating a curriculum?
Catherine: I think the first thing to think about is that you need a progression of skills. So you need to know what you are actually going to teach in that year group. It’s very, very easy to go from a point of view of, I would like to teach this lesson and it will be fun and it will be great without knowing what those children need to learn in a particular year group. It’s knowing the national curriculum inside out. As Simon says, for Foundation, it doesn’t help sometimes very much, because some of the programmes of study cover from Year 3 to Year 6. So then you’ve got to drill down into those programmes of study and think what aspects of those actually come first. What do you need to teach first before you teach the next step and the next step, so that by the end of year six, the outcome, the end point of a year six is that you have covered that programme of study and you actually understand all the aspects in it. And I think that’s a massive, massive task.
Simon: I think that’s absolutely spot on, Catherine, because I think what you’ve got is with the programme of studying, when we’re talking about subject progression, subject progression is about looking at the elements within the programmes of study and how they’re built on over time to get the full coverage and what knowledge, as well as the skills you’re going to be looking at. Because what the team did is they teased out from the national curriculum programmes of study and said right, whereas the aspects, where’s the concepts, how they all link to the big ideas, those global themes, those larger global concepts, and then to sort of bring it down. And say, right okay, so what is the progression going to be? What’s the element of that programme of study that they will do in year three. And then that will probably be repeated as well. And then where will it be done in year four, year five and year six. Where will the knowledge fit in? Where will the skills be developed? Where will they be then be used and applied within a project. And that is the web that has to be created and then implemented by the teachers, etc.
Caroline: And that’s rooted in basic learning science, because these children only will progress their knowledge and skills if they are given manageable chunks of opportunities to learn and practice and, you know, understand, and they’re given opportunities to remember knowledge, for example, then over time, if they then reapply in different contexts or hear of something else, that the teacher then helps them link to a pre known fact or some skill, then they’re building that schema, and that is the way that the children progress their knowledge and understanding in a skill. Say like map work you start with the basics. It’s something that teachers know isn’t it? We know we start with the basics, but you don’t often see it in a broader view, a linear across, say, from year one right up to year six. And that’s the thing.
Catherine: Yeah, that’s where we are at cornerstones, because we have the time to do that. So as a teacher, I didn’t see that broad overview because I was a year five teacher then I was a year six and then a year four. And it was only after a decade of teaching in different year groups that I started to piece together that idea of what the progression was.
Caroline: Yeah and what children have done before and two years, three years before and, and where they’re meant to be going to.
Simon: Great analogy that I’ve heard, and I’ve probably twisted it and changed it, but it was about the Jenga model that you ge. We all know Jenga, we all like Jenga. And in essence, that schema, if you think about it children are building schemas from what they’re experiencing and they’re building those up, and you imagine like Jenga with the bits missing, etc., what we’ve got to try and do is make sure as children are building up their Jenga little blocks, that we’re actually helping them to put a little bit of superglue on 1 or 2 of them to hold it together. But there will be gaps in there, and any curriculum you should be able to see where those gaps, those misconceptions are appearing. And then you can actually say, right, we need an extra brick put in there, or we need that brick removing because it’s actually completely the wrong shape and it’s going to make it all fall down. Remove that and put in the correct brick in there to build a Jenga that is absolutely solid for those children.
Caroline: That’s the skill of curriculum design is knowing what to put in and what to leave out. The skill of teaching is knowing how to teach children things that won’t add to their misconceptions or mistakes.
Simon: And the order of teaching as well. We talk about the teaching narrative and the sequence of lessons and things like that, which puts the order in place so they can actually build up that schema for themselves.
Catherine: And that is the teacher expertise that needs to come in, because every class of children is different. So your curriculum model can work, and then it’s a teacher expertise that can then adjust, move slightly and add in more, look at misconceptions and then do some over learning as well.
Caroline: Which is all good assessment for learning isn’t it? Ongoing.
Simon: That’s massive and rightly so. Schools are being asked, well how does your assessment inform your planning? It’s not about looking at numbers anymore. That’s gone. It’s about looking at how is your assessment informing your planning? How is it showing you those holes in the Jenga model? How is it showing you those misconceptions? What are you doing about it? And also, we talked about subjects. Subject leadership is going to become huge. And knowing coverage that we’ve already heard details about the most recent Ofsted inspectors and asking teachers ‘Tell me about your subject’. Subject leaders have got to know about from EYFS all the way through to year six.
Caroline: This is all about the deep dives.
Simon: Yes, the deep dives that come around. They’ve got to know about all of those. They’ve got to know what’s happening. What’s the progression in their subject. Do I know the end point for primary year six is what we’re delivering getting them there and what Ofsted, rightly so now is they’re spending their time actually looking at the reality for the children, what the children are actually learning. So it is taking that what’s the intent, what’s the subject coverage, Tell us that. Then okay, show us that in whatever form you’ve got and the Ofsted won’t ask for a particular form. Right okay, then let’s go and see if that’s happening in the classroom. Is it in the books when we talk to the children? Is it there? when we talk to the teachers, do they understand it? That’s what it’s all about.
Caroline: Yeah. So before all that, you’ve got to know the journey. And I think it was Heather Fern from Ofsted said your curriculum is the progression model. You construct a progression model almost like a track and that’s the journey you want your children to go through. Geography, history and so on. I think it’s a great time maybe, to talk about what we’ve actually done here, because whether you’re not a school using Cornerstone’s, it’s still interesting to know how you’ve done it and how you have looked at, say, geography, because I know all the geography knowledge rich projects have been finished and they’re up live now on Maestro, which is fantastic. But how did you approach those? Can you tell the listeners a little bit about how you get the subject, coverage and progression across those topics?
Catherine: Well, the new knowledge rich projects, the national curriculum was the starting point. We took the national curriculum programmes of study. We broke them down. We analysed them. We look really carefully about what each piece of that programme of study meant, what each word meant. And then we created our own model, our sets of learning intentions based around our big ideas in each subject. So we created that framework and that is the basis of the progression model. So each of those learning intentions builds through each year group.
Simon: For us a learning intention is a skill with implied knowledge. But then we were teasing out all the knowledge, which is the declarative knowledge that’s required.
Catherine: Yes, because we’ve also we’ve got a knowledge framework as well because they link to the learning intentions. So, we’ve got knowledge statements and that is actual core knowledge that children need to know. And then we took that skeleton framework and started to develop our KRP’s alongside the new Ofsted inspection framework and the requirements that was going to happen there. And so the KRP’s now have a driver subject. So our geography cops have a geography driver. So the learning intentions and the knowledge statements for geography that we’ve created, teased out from the programmes of study are now in our geography KRP’s. Those statements and the knowledge are the backbone of it. So, anything that’s in a lesson in our KRP’s is to deliver those learning intentions and that knowledge, we then also have created for each lesson some specific subject knowledge, if it’s been needed, because we really looked carefully about the progression of what children need to know. And sometimes you can’t just do a general knowledge statement. You have to you have to think, what is that lesson teaching and how can that knowledge be built on in the next lesson?
Caroline: So, you’ve got this overview and you’re revisiting knowledge or you’re building upon knowledge as the children go through.
Catherine: You build it through because the KRP’s are in a sequence and it has taken a long time to get that sequence right, to make sure that each lesson builds one on another to build a bank of knowledge, a bank of skills and understanding. And that goes through the engage and develop stages. Because our KRP’s are still with our pedagogy, our four statements, but our engage and develop and our memorable experience all build sequentially to create a bank of knowledge and skills.
Caroline: That the children then apply and express later on in the project.
Catherine: Well, that’s a key thing because our innovate section, where children can use those skills and it’s very, very tightly linked to the engage and develop stages. The lessons that we teach, the innovate is very tightly linked and actually gives a chance for reviewing knowledge, but also using it in a context, and children should use it independently.
Caroline: That’s actually a really good time for a teacher to assess as well. I would use that. And in fact, I spoke to a headteacher recently about this and they have seen the new knowledge rich projects, the KRP’s, and said that it’s the innovate stage that they are finding transformative for them because it’s a time where they can actually see the children apply knowledge that they’ve built up through those two stages and see, you know, talking about the Jenga and misconceptions. So, it just gave them this school room to do that and to really see where the knowledge had been applied.
Simon: Checking to see if that knowledge is becoming sticky is so important at that stage. And also what’s key is we’ve mentioned that sequence of lessons and yes, that may be in a subject, but within that, especially when we’re talking about cross-curricular projects, which the vast majority of primary schools do use, and Ofsted said that is absolutely fine. The key is, well, it might not be all geography lessons in that sequence. Because there may be some science and some history that is very relevant to enable the children to build those schemas and build everything else and get real quality learning out of it. What we’re working on right now as part of curriculum Maestro and always listening to feedback from schools, what they need and our own ideas, is we’re being able to flick between looking at it as a cross-curricular approach and saying, yeah, but we need to just flick and see it as a subject and a sequence of lessons for that subject. Is the flow there? Is the knowledge and skill progression there for that? And then flick back and say, and does it work within the cross curriculum?
Caroline: Okay, so schools can use Maestro to do those two different views, because I’ve also talked to a school in London who just wanted to do this is our geography book. This is our and they use Cornerstones, but they want we do a geography lesson, we do a history and they’re doing that. So on Maestro you can plan that out, can’t you? And I didn’t realise that actually.
Simon: Soon it’s going to go live very, very soon, probably after half term. And basically, they’ll just be able to just flick between the two. And that enables that the teacher or the senior leader or the subject lead to look at a project and say, all right, I want to look at the actual progression, that sequence of lessons, that order of teaching. And is it right?
Caroline: Actually, from what I’ve heard from Ofsted, that is extremely important.
Simon: Yeah, I’m really pleased we we’re doing that development and now we’re hearing those teams thinking okay, it’s coming.
Catherine: But I think what Simon said about it being relevant, there are cross-curricular links in the KRP in all of them. The driver subject is the main driver. But they are truly relevant. And the idea is that will build up. So that’s a brilliant tool that you can have a look at all your geography. Because even if you’re doing a science driver, you will still see that there’ll be some geography elements and those geography elements will be relevant. They will build up, but also, they will build up across the year group.
Caroline: Otherwise, we’ve got a secondary model, which is what Matthew Purvis said to me. He did not want to see any primary. You don’t want to just do a lesson after lesson of geography science, and that you need to weave in the links where they’re all, I think, authentic and meaningful.
Catherine: I think that’s a really key word, authentic. And that’s what we have time at Cornerstones to do. We can see it all. We can have this overview, and we can make these links that are quite hard to find in the national curriculum. You’ve got rocks in science and you’ve got rocks in geography and you’ve got mountains in geography. Actually, they all link together. So those lessons are linked. But we give chance for over learning. We give chance for repeating learning intentions through different projects.
Caroline: Low stakes quizzing, which I’m very excited about, and the knowledge organiser, knowledge organiser for each one. There are six, aren’t there for the whole school?
Catherine: Yes, there’s six geography KRP’s.
Caroline: Okay, if you teach every one of those you are guaranteed subject coverage. Is that right?, in geography
Catherine: You get excellent coverage. You get really good coverage. But there will also be other geography sessions in the other KRP’s that are going to be released later on. So there will be some geography coverage in history and science and geography link really beautifully. So, there will be other chances of coverage and other aspects of coverage in the other KRPs as well.
Simon: Part of what we’ve developed in curriculum Maestro and we’re developing continuing to develop to make sure subject leaders have those tools at their fingertips to be able to drill down themselves. And I’m not going to mention, well, I’m going to mention deep dive, but they’re going to drill down and they’re going to see if the progression is there and that real coverage is there.
Caroline: So what can you do on Maestro already for that and what is coming up soon for that?
Simon: Straight away it shows you where you’ve got good coverage and you’re able to make sure that you can add in. If you maybe you’ve made project selections that’s missing massive gaps in the national curriculum. It will show that instantly you’ll change the projects. Then you might have 1 or 2 gaps in programmes of study that are missing. You can put those in, but then it’s about going deeper. And what we will be releasing very shortly is where subject leaders can then go deeper and say what elements of that programme of study maybe could be missed or have been missed, and they’ll be able to input those into the projects by creating the lessons either alongside the teacher or if they’re a specialist in music or art, they can develop those lessons themselves and they will then magically appear in the projects. And the teacher then knows, right, I definitely have to teach that one. I can deselect and select some other of the lessons, and so you can create your narrative. I can add, but they can make it completely bespoke to ensure the progression that that school wants, that the coverage that that school wants can be achieved.
Caroline: And that’s all in one place. That’s the good thing about Maestro is that it’s all interlinked, and it can you can run reports from that and everything. It’s all there. And if I suppose the groundwork is done for you, if you’ve got the KRP’s and you’re doing and you’re a geography lead or humanities lead, we’ve got geography ones at the moment. We’re going to have history and science soon. You’ve got as a subject lead, you’ve got your coverage there. If you want to add in, enhance or change anything, you can do that all on Maestro.
Simon: But also if you’re not using the cornerstones curriculum content. You may feel we’ve got a great curriculum, but we need to make sure it’s all connected. That’s where we designed and made sure we had the option of Maestro Lite, where you can actually utilize that to create your own projects from what you’re currently doing in school.
Caroline: So you can write your own projects, upload them if you like, into or actually type them in, can’t you? Onto curriculum Maestro Lite and then it will do the coverage checking because.
Simon: You tied them all to programmes of study and learning intentions. You would tie them to the learning intention and knowledge progression framework that we’ve produced. Tie it all together. And that’s how some schools are doing it for English and maths to make sure they have got this very clear progression model going through.Subject coverage, subject progression. It’s there, it’s all interlinked. It can be assessed. Those missing Jenga pieces can be then put in, everything else and it all works in one place.
Catherine: And I think to add to that, that model allows you to do it. But then with the KRP’s you go really deeply into it. So if you are a subject leader, coverage to you might be, well, what’s actually what’s happening in the classroom? What texts are people using, what resources are they actually using, what’s being talked about and said to actually put those learning intentions across and to actually create that progression? I think that’s an amazing thing about Maestro. You can sort it all out, so you’ve got that coverage, but quite a lot of people almost finish at that and they don’t actually drill down into, well, what is each lesson going to be about and what am I going to use in that lesson? So with the KRP’s, that’s been a lot of my work lately. It’s the detail. So in that half hour or that hour that the teacher is with the children delivering that learning intention, what are they going to say? What are they going to ask the children to do? What are they going to use to support the children? So Maestro is amazing because we have created resources that are bespoke to each year group and we’ve used progression throughout. So you mentioned map work. So picture maps are in year one. It moves on to maps with keys in year two and throughout Key stage two they get more complex looking at contour lines.
Caroline: That’s great because as a teacher sometimes I went on the internet, I got resources and you can never unless you really know what’s been happening beforehand or you’ve got a really clear curriculum model. You sometimes don’t know if a child has already seen this kind of thing before. And that’s all right sometimes to recap. But other times, if there’s no clarity of progression and in your resources, which are often called the foot soldiers of your curriculum, which I love because they are so much part of your curriculum and you’ve created them obviously, to match the project.
Catherine: Yeah. And that’s been a big thing. And we’ve tried to create resources that will give the knowledge in a progressive way, but also ways to record what they know or even teacher information. So sometimes we have included knowledge or an idea of how you deliver a lesson for the teacher as well, so your subject leaders can see what is being used in the classroom, the level of what’s happening in year one and two, if they want to.
Simon: Exactly, that’s right. And also it’s going back to that really key thing there about yeah, the intentions there. This is the substance of our curriculum. This is what we’re doing. But what’s actually happening? and being able to sort of monitor and manage that on a subject level or a whole school level, or on a class level or even on a pupil level. That’s the key.
Caroline: Yeah. And you can’t do that with paper in folders, can you?
Simon: You can but the highlighting pens that you would need and the nightmare of that is just it’s terrible. And so workload wise, whereas what we’ve created hopefully will enable schools to do that so easily.
Catherine: And we all know that things get in the way of what you intend. It’s just the way school is and not being able to find a resource that you need, or not being able to access the video of a concept that you’re wanting to teach can be the difference between teaching it and not teaching it.
Caroline: So, what’s on Maestro? Am I right in thinking you can you go into a timetable and you’ve got your lessons in there. You click on them, they automatically come up and your resources are like hyperlinks. You don’t have to flick through lots of different tabs or think, where did I put that resource? It’s all there in one place. So it’s on your timetable. So that’s how you help them with that.
Simon: Part of the reason for the timetable facility that we built in is you can drag and drop the, the lessons that either you’ve created yourself or you’ve adapted into a timetable because quite soon you’ll see, especially if it’s a short half term, there are as short as four weeks sometimes, but a five week half term and you start thinking, well, I can’t fit all this in. And rather than getting towards the end of a project and thinking, I’ve not done this, you realise that as you’re creating that teaching narrative right at the start, this is a sequence of lessons that I need to teach. How am I going to fit this in? Right? I’ve got a short half term. I do have to make some changes here, but I can not teach that and I don’t lose the flow. The children are still going to be fine. The subject progression is going to be there. That’s what we’re trying to give.
Caroline: So with Maestro, can you then you can shorten a project. Could you reassign a learning intention somewhere else?
Simon: Yes you can. You can do like a coverage checker however many times you want. It’s live. It’s there. It’s telling you what you’ve covered, what you’ve not covered straight away.
Catherine: What I would say about the design of the KRP’s, which is different to our older ILP’s, is they are shorter and the shorter for that specific reason.
Caroline: I have to ask though, if you’ve got ILP’s, if you’ve not yet moved on to the KRP’s, how would you ensure subject coverage and progression with the existing ILP’s?
Simon: Well, that’s interesting because that informed our development work, because obviously talking to head teachers I found that what they were doing, they were using what we called our detailed coverage checker and our gap analysis. And schools love that because it gave them that confidence. This is it. We’ve got national curriculum coverage or there’s the gaps and we can plug those with an art week or science week however they were doing it. But then rightly so head teachers say well yeah, but that’s intended, what’s actually happening. And they were getting teachers to start ticking things off. And they were also one headteacher was actually trying to tipex things out as well, because the head teachers tend to like things nice and neat as well, and in folders at times. And there’s some brilliant people out there. But what so what we said is we need to show that actual we need to do it live and it needs to be electronic because that enables teachers to hold it. And that’s reducing the workload, because if many can do, it’s not down to one person. And everybody can see because we’ve got some people who are subject leaders for three, four subjects because it’s a small school.
Caroline: So going back to that, then if you’ve just got the ILP’s up on Maestro, you can say, look at geography and looking at the sequence and the way it develops across the year group. So you can see that it’s there.
Simon: All schools will have the IPS’s automatically get the KRP’s as well on Maestro they don’t on the hub.
Caroline: If you’re listening to this and you’re ahead or a teacher at a school who uses cornerstones and is on the hub, I suppose what we’d really like you to do is to move over from the hub onto Maestro.
Simon: And especially when the new history and the science start coming online, you’ll get those, and we can just make sure you can seamlessly come across no problem at all.
Caroline: Oh, and companion projects, each one has a companion project, doesn’t it? And that gives you well, you tell them because I didn’t work on it. I wish I’d worked on them, but I didn’t. So you tell us what are the companion projects that come with each one?
Catherine: So each KRP, as we said, has a subject driver, but we wanted to put some coverage for DT design technology and art and design. So our companion projects there’s one per KRP. So at the moment there are six each matching a geography project. And they either cover aspects of design and technology or art. The overarching theme of the project fits with the KRP that you are working on. So, we’ve got an ammonite project to go with the year three project that includes work about rocks, but in the KRP that one’s an art project, so it delivers learning intentions for art and design.
Caroline: So it’s got all the skills and the knowledge for art?
Catherine: Yes, and they’re written in a progressive structure. It’s still written to the four cornerstones of learning. So you still have an interest in engage that pedagogy, and it still has an innovate. And that’s where the children can use what they’ve learned through the learning intentions in the innovate to create a piece of art. And then they can share it at the end. Those will have coverage to the design and technology projects especially have a different focus. So you might be focusing on mechanisms or food. There are links to the KRP, so you get the cross-curricular knowledge and understanding that you can use in your artwork as well.
Caroline: Lovely, I know every school does things slightly differently, but on the whole primaries, primary children, showing them those meaningful links where they’re very authentic, it brings it to life. So it’s not just a quiz. Amanda Spielman said, A pub quiz style education. She’s not interested in that.
Simon: Another thing that I think is massive in the new KRP’s. Whereas you’ve got your book study in Key Stage one and your novel study, and Catherine and her team have produced actually resources to support that, which for me is huge as well.
Caroline: So, I think we’ve come to a close. It’s not a close in terms of the national situation.
Simon: We’re talking about this and the other aspects around it for quite a while.
Caroline: Talking of coverage, dear listener, we covered an awful lot there. I hope it wasn’t too overwhelming. From our point of view obviously, we’ve been working in the world of curriculum, and that’s what Simon and Catherine and the team are doing, is creating curriculum content and threading it together and ensuring coverage and progression. And also, if you’re not a Cornerstones school and that’s whetted your appetite or you just want to know more about it, then do visit our website. Our materials and tools can really help you achieve subject progression and reduce your workload around this. So you can focus on the things that matter, which as we know is the teaching, the learning, the children. So thanks again for listening. Until next time, goodbye.
Simon Hickton, Catherine Scutt, Caroline Pudner 29th October 2019