Curriculum, teaching and support

Guidance, ideas and examples to support schools in developing their curriculum, pedagogy, enrichment and support for more able learners, within a whole-school context of cognitively challenging learning for all. Includes ideas to support curriculum development, and practical examples, resources and ideas to try in the classroom. Popular topics include: curriculum development, enrichment, independent learning, questioning, oracy, resilience, aspirations, assessment, feedback, metacognition, and critical thinking.

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Diversity in reading: why it matters and what schools can do

Posted By Alison Tarrant, 07 December 2020

Alison Tarrant, Chief Executive, School Library Association (SLA)

I struggle with addressing the importance of diversity accurately, but fundamentally I think Ruth Bader Ginsberg sums it up best:

“When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.”

Every child should read about how other children live and about alternative experiences, and I don’t think we should limit this to a certain percentage or context. Until children can pick up a book and not be surprised that a character looks like them (or doesn’t look like them), we have work to do. It’s vital that the resources children engage with are noticeably representative (there are many studies which show even animals are more likely to be male in books, so the argument that animals or monsters are equally representative doesn’t work). For more on this, watch the SLA's webinar "Representation for All" – available for NACE members until the end of January 2021.

If we look at BookTrust Represents' interim research and CLPE’s Reflecting Realities survey of ethnic representation in UK children’s literature, both report some positive progress in recent years:

3% growth in the number of authors and illustrators of colour published in the UK in the last two years.
7% of the children’s books published in the UK over the last three years feature characters of colour.

This is progress, but the pace of change doesn’t yet seem to match the level of the discussion which has taken place. I’m hopeful that the new initiatives launched in light of the events of this year will lead to a significant increase on these figures next year. In the meantime, how can schools ensure their resources are diverse, representative and inclusive?

Key questions to consider

For many schools, the topic of diversity and inclusion prompted self-evaluation this year. An audit of the curriculum and/or resources may have taken place, though this can be done in many different ways. Here are some core questions to ask when thinking about diversity within your resources:

How many of your resources are written by ethnic minorities or people seen less in the public eye? This may include consideration for UK-based ethnic minorities, authors with disabilities, authors from working-class backgrounds.
How many of the resources reflect stories from these groups? When thinking about this, consideration should also be given to how those characters are represented; if every story which includes a black character shows them suffering abuse, it embeds a story overall. Are these stories “issues” stories, or simply great stories with authentic characters? Are they suitable for discovery alone, or do they need a conversation and some scaffolding beforehand? (There was a very interesting and upsetting discussion around the impact of “Of Mice and Men” on pupils and teachers recently – you can read it about it in this Twitter thread.)
How often do you create displays around these characters, authors, books? Celebrate these authors alongside their mainstream colleagues, rather than as part of Black History Month or awareness days, as consistently “including” them in this way may actually send a message of “othering” as opposed to inclusion.
Are your resources providing a broad range of experiences and perspectives? Match the resources to the cohort, absolutely, but include resources for wider awareness as well. For example, resources about travellers are important for the travelling community; but they’re also important for representing an alternative narrative to the stereotype which is so easily absorbed, so should also be available in schools without those cohorts.
Is your school collection keeping pace? Ensuring representation and inclusion doesn’t happen by accident. It requires an in-depth knowledge of the school’s resource collection, it can be supported or hindered by the collection policy, and it does require funding. There are equity issues with schools which are not funding their resources sufficiently; these schools are often pushed to get resources from donations or charity shops, and while there may be an occasional bargain to be found, these should not form the basis of a collection. Publishers have been increasingly proactive in paying attention to these issues, and are constantly scanning and reacting to the world around them. The books produced in the last year or two will take a long time to filter through to donations (most often as children grow up or out of books), so if schools rely on donations/second-hand purchases, this delays the impact of changes and leaves some children missing out.

Note on diversity in resource formats

Diversity should also be reflected in the type of resource encountered. Throughout this blog I’ve used the word resources instead of “book” – this is not just because schools should be considering all their resources, but also because “book” can be taken to have a very narrow meaning. Resources, in this blog, means fiction books, information books, e-books, audio books, graphic novels, poetry books, wordless books, picture books and much more. Teachers are incredibly good at selecting the right resource for the right piece of work, but we also need to be mindful of the overall messaging when all those resources are put together, and those with responsibility for the school library need to make sure that representation, inclusion, and importantly choice, are available to all pupils.

Attainment and the gender gap: understanding what works

Posted By Neil Jones, 22 January 2020

Neil Jones, Lead Practitioner for More Able Students at Impington Village College, shares key findings from the school’s focus on understanding the gender gap and moving beyond common stereotypes to develop more effective forms of support.

In common with many schools in England, our school identifies a gap in attainment between boys and girls at GCSE. In my role as Lead Practitioner for More Able Students, I had also noted an even larger gap, between boys and girls identified by teachers as having particularly high academic ability or talent in foundation subjects. It seemed there might have been a perception that girls (as a group) simply outperform boys (as a group). As a result, one of our strategic priorities for 2018-19 was that “all students make accelerated progress, with a particular focus on disadvantaged students and boys”.

We established a working group to investigate the causes of the attainment gap, whether anything was happening (or not happening) in classrooms to cause or sustain this gap, and what we could realistically do to address this. Our investigation aimed to build on previous work and existing practice, drawing on the insight and support of the middle leaders who make up our professional learning group, while fully engaging all teachers.

Phase 1: developing our thinking

The working group developed an online questionnaire to gather colleagues’ perceptions on the gender attainment and engagement gap. This included the 15 “barriers to boys’ learning” outlined in Gary Wilson’s influential book Breaking Through Barriers to Boys’ Achievement: Developing a Caring Masculinity (2013). It also contained a ‘pre-mortem’ question: “Imagine we innovated a whole range of things to improve boys' engagement and progress... and it was a spectacular failure. Write down examples of what we got wrong, and the impacts.” This open approach led to heated and productive debate, with a high response rate and a wide range of opinions and concerns expressed.

With suggestions from teachers across the school, we compiled a reading list around the gender gap (see below for examples), aiming to identify core themes and patterns. The key findings from our reading were that:

In the UK, there has been a 9% gap in achievement between girls and boys since at least 2005; prior to that a gap was in evidence at O-Level and the 11+ exam.
This gap is the same in many developed countries, but the narrative is different. In France, for example, the gap causes less consternation.
Historically, almost all cultures have bemoaned adolescent boys’ “idleness” and their “ideal of effortless achievement”.
The gap narrows in late adolescence and, internationally, by the age of 30 males have outstripped females in terms of their level of education and training, and earnings.
Gender is an unstable indicator of individual student’s attainment and engagement: not all boys are underachieving, and not all girls are achieving.
Gender-based approaches to teaching and learning are too often gimmicky, distracting and have no discernible effect on achievement. Learning has always been difficult; engagement comes from excellent subject knowledge of the teacher, supportive monitoring of understanding and confidence between teacher and learner.

Members of the working group visited several other schools, including one investigating boys who were following or bucking the trend of underachievement, and two using one-to-one mentoring to support underachieving students.

Phase 2: interventions

We asked the Director of Progress to share lists of students whose reports showed they were making both less progress and less effort than required. While this selection was gender-blind, the lists were, unsurprisingly, dominated by boys.

We then ran two six-week trials concurrently: a series of one-to-one 20-minute mentoring sessions with Year 8 students and a series of small-group, hour-long mentoring discussions with Year 10 students. The working group consulted during this process and fed back on what we judged was effective or otherwise, from our perspective and the students’.

Phase 3: lessons learned

We learned, crucially, that we mustn’t and can’t reduce our response to identity politics; what we can do is focus on teaching effectively and caring well.

Impact on teaching

The first impact on effective teaching is that our already tailored CPD will continue to focus on quality-first teaching. Members of the working group led well-received sessions scotching myths about the need for “boy-friendly” approaches such as competitions, kinaesthetic tasks, novelty/technology, befriending the “alpha” male, banter/humour, peer-to-peer teaching, negotiation, single-sex classes or male teachers.

What is proven to work instead, since time immemorial, is excellent teacher subject knowledge, firm but fair behaviour management and high-quality feedback – all of which are in place through our school’s existing assessment, accountability and quality management systems.

Impact on pastoral support

The second impact, on pastoral care, is that we understood that our underachieving students are, overwhelmingly but not exclusively, male; lack confidence; are therefore risk-averse academically; do not feel listened to; do not talk enough in order to explore their goals; cannot therefore link their learning meaningfully to their lives; feel lonely.

While Year 8 students responded quite well to one-to-one interventions, they were not yet mature enough to reflect very usefully on their experience. The two small groups of Year 10 students, however, were eager to talk, reflect and offer solidarity in encouraging ways. Insights from participants included:

“We work hard for the teachers who like us.”
“Extended day is pointless.”
“If we’re put in intervention, no one explains why.’”
“Interventions make me feel sh*t.”
“You need confidence to be motivated.”
“Some of our targets are genuinely too high.”
“It feels like the school is just after the grades.”
“If you share how you really feel with your mates it will all crumble.”

Phase 4: ongoing provision and evaluation

As of September 2019, we are running fortnightly after-school mentoring sessions for small groups of Year 11 students identified as being below target in progress and effort (chosen gender blind – 75% male, 25% female). These mentoring sessions run as an option for students, alongside two compulsory interventions for a much larger cohort of Year 11s. The first of these is an extended day, where students can revise together in the school library and focus on their own defined areas of study. The second is a series of extra lessons delivered at the end of the school day.

Keeping mentoring as an option for students (and their parents) seems to give them more sense of agency and responsibility. Numbers participating can fluctuate from week to week, but those participating are very positive. Many of the conversations involve making priorities and keeping things in perspective, and we encourage students to come up with their own solutions.

While it may be impossible to quantify the precise impact of this intervention with more able students, several students did better in their mocks than predicted, and more in line with their aspirational targets. Several parents, too, have been in touch to say that they find it makes a difference to their child’s attitude to learning. Goals post-16 are more defined. My overall hope for the programme is rather like Dr Johnson’s hope for literature: to help these young people find ways “better to enjoy life or, at least, endure it.” We will continue to monitor the programme’s popularity with students and its effectiveness.

Our approach frames underachievement as an issue requiring a further level of pastoral intervention, aimed at developing good habits of mind, a sense of purpose and the confidence these things bring. We hope these sessions will build solidarity between mentors and mentees, mentees and class teachers, and between the young people themselves. This will be vital if underachieving students are to reframe study and school life as opportunities to become excited about their aspirations and aims in life. Importantly, this intervention does not create gimmicky, evidence-free busywork for the teaching body, neither does it discriminate unfairly against girls.

Key takeaways:

The attainment gap between boys and girls of this age is perennial. The work we do in schools can only go some of the way to address it, so concentrate on what is in your control: teaching well and caring well.
Excellent teaching is what it always has been: that which allows students, male and female, to think. Learning is what it always has been: necessary, sometimes exciting, sometimes hard and distasteful. That goes for all of us, male and female.
That said, all children need to develop positive habits of mind to stay motivated and happy enough that their actions have meaning. There will be challenges to this, different between time and time and community and community. To work out what these challenges are, and how to address them intelligently, use a wide range of data to ask meaningful questions.
Loneliness and a lack of discussion about aims and habits are main drivers of underachievement and can quickly erode wellbeing. Boys as a group appear to feel these deficits more keenly than girls as a group (but not exclusively). We are in loco parentis and need to prioritise time and space for students who don’t do so at home to explore and examine how to develop successfully, in ways that are personal to them.
Use your colleagues’ professional expertise and nous and encourage them to engage in contextual reading. It is alarming at the present time – perhaps encouraged by the instantaneity of the Twittersphere – how much change can be reactive and ignore lessons from the history of education policy. Before initiating any major or contentious change, aim to run it by as many colleagues as possible and get a pre-mortem. In our experience, colleagues’ insights, suggestions and misgivings all played a crucial role in preventing us making major mistakes.

6 whole-school strategies to reduce gender bias

Posted By Jess Wade, 05 September 2018
Updated: 08 April 2019

Physicist Dr Jess Wade made headlines this summer for her campaign to get a copy of Angela Saini’s book Inferior into every UK school. The campaign aims to help schools break down gender stereotypes, challenging and supporting all young people to develop their abilities in all fields and to choose from a full breadth of career options. In this blog post for the NACE community, Dr Wade explains what motivated her to launch the campaign, and suggests six steps all schools can take to reduce gender bias.

This is a big year: 2018 marks 100 years since (some) women got the vote and 70 years since women could graduate from the University of Cambridge. For completeness: it is almost 200 years since the majority of men could vote and 809 years since they could graduate from Cambridge.

In many ways, we have come a long way since Charles Darwin wrote “the average of mental power in a man must be above that of a woman” in The Descent of Man (1881). But gender bias and stereotypes still impact young people’s self-confidence and subject choices, which is limiting their career opportunities and damaging the UK economy.

Despite boys and girls doing equally well at physics GCSE, girls only make up 22% of the physics A-level cohort (and this is the highest it has been for almost 10 years). The Institute of Physics (IOP) has been researching this for decades. In 2012 it found that more half of state-maintained secondary schools had no girls in their physics A-level classes and in 2013 that schools which had the fewest girls in physics A-level also had the fewest boys in psychology.

The Opening Doors report, published in 2015 by the IOP and the Government Equalities Office, offers teachers guidance and support in their efforts toward gender equality. In 2016, the Improving Gender Balance project recommended whole-school interventions to stop gender inequities in A-level choice, recognising that a school-wide approach is needed to make a difference.

The Inferior campaign

Last year Angela Saini published Inferior: The True Power of Women and the Science that Shows It. The book is a powerful collection of evidence that challenges the notion of differences between men and women. From parallel parking to an innate ability in maths, the science behind stereotypes is often dodgy and experiments are rarely reproducible.

Reading Inferior changed my life. It armed me with the facts to take on even the fiercest of naysayers and inspired me to speak up and fight harder. I’ve been taking it with me ever since – to every conference and every new research lab – and when I see someone impressive speak I give them a copy. Inferior has been so well received by the scientific community that last year Saini did a tour of UK universities, filling lecture theatres with passionate students and academics.

In mid-July I realised we should get Inferior into schools, so I set up a crowdfunding campaign with my friend Dr Claire Murray, hoping to get it into every all-girls state school in the country. We reached that goal in less than 24 hours, so raised the bar even higher: every state school in Britain.

Thanks to Saini’s epic publishers (4th Estate), who agreed to match any funds we raised and manage distribution, it took less than 12 days for 800 people to donate enough money. At some stage over the next academic year, Inferior will be finding its way to your school library. Instead of just telling young people about stereotypes, we want them to read about the science, history, individuals and societies behind such stereotypes for themselves. I want them to get as excited as I am about challenging bias, and as motivated as I am for a fairer future.

6 changes all schools can make now

When you receive your copy of Inferior, I hope you use it as the stimulus for discussion with young people, and to plan activities within and beyond the classroom. A bunch of people who donated to the campaign didn’t want to just stop there; together we are creating a set of resources to help teachers make effective use of Inferior (sign up to help out here).

In the meantime, here are six changes you can make straight away:

1. Stop using sexist and gendered language

Whether it is “we need a couple of strong boys” or “you girls will be good at this creative part”, such sentences stick around in young people’s consciousness and affect their perception of themselves and others.

2. Collect data

Compare your school to national averages and identify areas for concern – then act on them.

3. Build careers guidance into lessons

Make sure it is up-to-date and gender neutral. If you’re keen on using “role models”, plan this carefully; try to make their relationship with the school more long-term and invite parents along. A lot of early-career scientists and engineers hang out on Twitter – find us there!

4. Stop saying subjects are “hard”

Some people find art impossible and some can’t add up the tab at a bar – and that’s ok. Teachers are incredibly influential and their biases can have a profound impact on young people’s perceptions. Instead of characterising certain fields as inherently difficult or referring to natural talent, talk about each individual working to the best of his/her ability.

5. Acknowledge unconscious bias

Teachers need to be aware of how they might inadvertently send gendered views to their students. Schools can support this through formal training, by signposting resources such as online tests designed to highlight unconscious bias, and by establishing a norm of acknowledging and discussing these issues.

6. Don’t try and do it all by yourselves

Get students and parents involved too. Discuss gendered aspirations at parents’ evenings. Get students to read Inferior and discuss ways to change school culture so that it is more equal for everyone.

For a more comprehensive list, read the IOP’s Opening Doors report.

Finally, remember you are NOT alone. 800 people raised £22,000 in less than two weeks to get Inferior into your classrooms. Read, share, discuss, and make a difference!

Dr Jess Wade is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics and Centre for Plastic Electronics at Imperial College London. She is a member of the WISE Young Women’s Board and the WES Council, founder of Women in Physics at Imperial, and has worked with teachers across the country through the Stimulating Physics Network. Her significant work in public engagement and school outreach has been widely recognised, recently through the Daphne Jackson Medal and Prize. She tweets @jesswade.

Tags: access aspirations campaigns CEIAG gender science STEM

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