Published: 30 June 2009
Ofsted - Impact of the new Key Stage 3 curriculum
Teachers are generally positive about curriculum changes which have allowed them to be more creative in their teaching, according to the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills.
Ofsted’s report - Planning for change: The impact of the new Key Stage 3 curriculum - found that, of all the changes, teachers were most enthusiastic about, how less prescription had enabled them to introduce more varied & engaging approaches to teaching & learning.
The majority of Year 7 students interviewed were also mostly positive about the variety in teaching and the ways in which this involved them in their learning.
Christine Gilbert, Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector, said:
“It is still early days for the new Key Stage 3 curriculum but our inspectors found a generally optimistic picture with both teachers and pupils positive about the changes.
Now the task is to ensure that this positive approach in lessons translates into improving standards for pupils in all schools.”
Ofsted inspectors visited 37 schools which taught Year 7 students, including a mix of sizes and urban or rural locations across England, during the first two terms after the new Key Stage 3 curriculum was introduced in order to look at the early stages of implementation.
The Key Stage 3 changes were designed to provide greater flexibility for schools to develop the curriculum in ways that meet the needs of all learners more closely.
This flexibility can be used to develop more varied and engaging teaching approaches, provide focused support and greater challenge so that all pupils progress and to make learning more relevant by connecting subjects, events and wider activities.
Planning for the new curriculum and early implementation were outstanding in four of the schools visited, good in 21, satisfactory in eight and inadequate in one.
In the most successful schools, senior leaders had ensured that staff were involved in developing a coherent curriculum throughout the school, and senior staff monitored its implementation.
However, a common feature in the less successful schools was that subject leaders were left to interpret the curriculum as they saw fit.
In these schools, no matter how good the development was in individual subjects, the curriculum as a whole lacked coherence.
Subject departments were also at different stages of implementing the new curriculum. Some were fully prepared, while others had made only minor modifications.
The new curriculum includes a focus on developing personal, learning and thinking skills and the tools necessary for working life such as team work, creative thinking and self management.
Although there were some good examples of these skills underpinning learning across the curriculum, introducing them 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.
Functional skills - those core elements of English, mathematics and ICT that provide individuals with the skills and abilities they need to operate confidently, effectively & independently - were usually well planned and taught.
But there was little development of them across the curriculum.
Only four of the schools surveyed were using other subjects, cross-curricular work, particular school events or other aspects of the curriculum to enable students to develop or strengthen these skills.
All the schools made clear links between the curriculum at Key Stage 3 and the rest of the secondary curriculum, however, only five of the schools knew enough about the primary National Curriculum to create links with it and improve pupils’ transition from primary to secondary school.
Similarly assessment information from primary schools was not being used to inform teaching and learning in Key Stage 3 in a way that helped teachers personalise provision in this sample of schools.
The key recommendations from the report are for:
· the QCA to provide more support to schools to help them assess students’ progress in developing personal, learning & thinking skills
· the DCSF to provide support and guidance for schools to help them to devise coherent plans across the whole curriculum
· for schools to ensure that all subjects meet the statutory requirements in planning to implement the programmes of study at Key Stage 3
Further information
Planning for change: The impact of the new Key Stage 3 curriculum
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