Read more:

• Reinventing assessment in the post-pandemic world
• Cause for celebration, not criticism: reflections on the GCSE class of 2021

1. The need for curriculum catch-up varies enormously within and between schools, and between individual students.

2. The social purpose of schooling has been underlined as never before.

3. The challenge lies not in getting back to where we were, but to deciding where we want (and need) to go.

As UNICEF reports that 700 million days of education could be lost this academic year in the UK, Jon Murphy, NACE Associate and recently retired headteacher of Llanfoist Fawr and Llavihangel Primary Schools Federation, reflects on the need to focus on social and emotional wellbeing as schools prepare to return, and asks if the focus on health and wellbeing in the new Curriculum for Wales could be helpful to all schools.

Over a shockingly short timescale we have become all too familiar with a vocabulary that was most certainly not part of our daily conversation only a few months ago. “Lockdown”, “social isolation” and “social distancing” have become common parlance regardless of age, occupation or the part of the world in which we live. The coronavirus has undeniably changed the world as we know it. As we learn to live with the consequences of COVID-19 and the “new normal”, and as we start to contemplate a return to school, we will be teaching children to use and apply these new concepts to ensure the continuing safety of all. Like no other period in history, we will be sharply focusing our work to ensure the health and wellbeing of children and young people is secure. Not an easy task when children are naturally gregarious and demonstrative, and when their basic instinct is to be tactile with their peers, particularly the youngest of our charges.

Backed by support and resources from schools, commendable efforts have been made to home educate children. Anecdotally we know there has been considerable variance in the provision made, and there has been a very definite re-affirmation that there are few substitutes for a classroom staffed by qualified professionals. As children return to school, they will be at very different stages in their readiness to learn.

Backed by support and resources from schools, commendable efforts have been made to home educate children. We know there has been considerable variance in the provision made, and there has been a very definite re-affirmation that there are few substitutes for a classroom staffed by qualified professionals. The DfE last week published school case studies presenting a range of emerging practice. As children return to school, they will be at very different stages in their readiness to learn.

Layers of trauma and “the unseen monster”

Without doubt, young people will relish the social interaction of being with peers again. However, there will also be challenges after an unprecedented prolonged period spent out of school. For months many children have been kept at home, told that this is a safe sanctuary and the world beyond is not. Children are incredibly perceptive. Some will have absorbed the stress and fear of their parents and carers, adding to their own insecurities. Some could be painfully aware of the financial impact the virus has had on family income, adding yet another layer of trauma.

When children are integrated back into society and school, many will be taking tentative steps filled with trepidation, re-entering a world which was for so long seen as a place of danger. As they leave their families for the first time, some will fear for their parents or carers, many of whom are employed on the frontline as key workers.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget, renowned for his work on child development, simply but very profoundly stated: “children think differently to adults”. With this in mind, we should be aware of how children might perceive COVID-19 and what role we can play in school to mitigate any negative impact on their emotional wellbeing. More able learners may well be able to grasp and understand at an abstract level what the virus actually is. Meanwhile for learners still operating at a concrete level, particularly the very young, the virus is a mysterious thing that they can’t see, smell, taste or feel. It remains something that in their imagination can be conjured up in so many manifestations. Film directors of the horror genre are very aware that the unseen monster is far more terrifying than anything that is visible.

Preparing for a safe return to school

This week the DfE released plans for a phased reopening of schools in England from 1 June at the earliest. Meanwhile Welsh Government has launched the Stay Safe Stay Learning initiative, with Education Minister Kirsty Williams setting out five principles to guide thinking about a safe return to education. The first principle, quite rightly, is the health, safety and emotional wellbeing of children, young people and staff.

COVID-19 has dominated life all day every day for the past few months and we should be under no delusions about its long-term impact; as such we need to be prepared to plan long-term. Safeguarding the health, safety and emotional wellbeing of all in our school communities will be both an immediate and long-term priority; school doors will not open again without planning and preparation for what will be a carefully considered and measured transition back to school life.

Children’s experience of school life is going to be vastly different to what they were used to before school doors were forced to close so abruptly. When schools recommence, we will have to teach them a whole new set of sophisticated behaviours and values relating to social distancing and peer interaction. As stated by the Welsh Minister, physical, mental and emotional health is more important than anything at the moment – an area which had already been brought to the fore in the new Curriculum for Wales.

Bringing health and wellbeing education to the fore

Previous to the pandemic, schools in Wales had been charged with reimagining the educational offer for children and young people through development of the new curriculum. One of the six Areas of Learning and Experience (AoLEs) that will constitute the new orders is Health and Wellbeing, an area that will take centre stage when schools return. Welsh Government sees this AoLE as an area that “will help to foster a whole-school approach that enables health and well-being to permeate all aspects of school life”. The component parts of this AoLE – development of physical health, mental health, and emotional and social wellbeing – must be core to the education of all children on their return to school. Initial provision will need to focus on transition activities that support social and emotional literacy; we cannot even begin to teach the academic subjects until emotional wellbeing is secure.

Currently, alongside the task of teaching, education professionals in Wales are planning for the new curriculum and testing new ways of working for the future. It would seem prudent, considering the current health crisis, to bring their vision for the new curriculum into sharp focus now and to prioritise and even accelerate the development of the Health and Wellbeing AoLE. There is an urgent need to plan for a series of activities and experiences that rebuild children’s confidence and resilience in light of what has now become a part of their daily lives. We must teach them how to live with the pandemic and the part they must play to keep themselves and others safe. Now is the time to be innovative and to reimagine this element of the curriculum because now is the time that it is most needed.

Moving forward: a stronger, wiser generation

It is said that stopping the pandemic is “the most urgent shared endeavour of our times”, and one thing is for sure: when children return to school their health, safety and wellbeing is being placed in the capable of hands of a workforce that will help them learn to interact and exist in a changed world. Schools who made the investment of training staff in emotional literacy initiatives such as Thrive and ELSA will reap the benefits of being able to provide support for the most fragile of those returning to a world that can now seem especially frightening and uncertain. We can take heart in knowing that most learners are innately resilient and will adapt with few problems as schools evolve. We have the tools with the Wellbeing AoLE to be able plan and offer the best provision for keeping all in school safe. The principles and rationale behind the AoLE are sound and the present is the time we would benefit most from the best practice it advocates. As we help children to adapt to a different way of life, who knows, we may even nurture a generation of learners who will be inspired to go onto careers of caring for others or even to be the innovators that prevent such a crisis happening again.

The shadow cast by COVID-19 has forced children to grow up very quickly. It has already stolen a significant portion of their schooling, and we must not allow it to rob them of their precious childhood. As educationalists we are in the privileged position of guiding children as positively as we can through this unprecedented period of history, so they emerge stronger, wiser, safer and more conscious of health and wellbeing than any generation that has gone before.

NACE Challenge Award Adviser Elaine Ricks-Neal reviews emerging trends from the first round of Ofsted reports under the new education inspection framework (EIF).

There’s certainly a very different feel to the new Ofsted reports. Whilst they are clearly written with parents in mind – reflected in the use of accessible terminology and avoidance of too much detail in the published reports – there is no doubt that schools’ curriculum design and delivery is under forensic scrutiny. And although there is little explicit reference to more able learners, the importance of high-quality provision for this group is implicit in the strong focus on curriculum planning, subject-level provision, and breadth and depth of learning.

Style and structure of the new reports

The reports are written in a surprisingly simple style which Ofsted has said is intended to be parent-friendly, getting right to the point and largely steering clear of education jargon – for example, “The school is not a results factory.”

Both section 8 and section 5 reports look very similar, each opening with a short paragraph addressing the question “What is it like to attend this school?” – summing up the school ethos, behaviour, attendance and day-to-day opportunities. In most cases, the report’s opening statements are positive, but any issue linked with behaviour or low standards will be simply – even bluntly – highlighted; for example, “Pupils enjoy school, but they should be doing much better.”

The reports then move on to the main section: “What does the school do well and what does it need to do better?” – bundling together judgements for the quality of education, personal development, and leadership and management. This can make it quite hard to tease out the reasons for any difference in section 5 judgements of any of these strands.

Finally, there is a paragraph on safeguarding, followed by improvement points.

What key themes are emerging?

·         Focus on curriculum design and subject plans

The reports may have a simple style, but it’s clear that curriculum plans and schemes of work have really been unpicked to check how well “subject leaders plan the curriculum so that pupils build on their knowledge so that they know and remember more”. If your curriculum is not coherent and well thought-through, there is no hiding place. Not surprisingly, a very frequent weakness is that subject planning is not “precisely planned and sequenced.” In primary schools this is often in foundation subjects. There is also real drilling down into phonics, the reading curriculum, mathematics and the quality of SEND provision.

If standards are referred to, which is not the case in all reports, it is usually a simple broad comment – for example, “pupils achieve well” – and linked back to how well subjects are planned and taught. This doesn’t mean results are not deemed important, and schools which have dropped a grade will usually have a critical comment about standards, but the emphasis is on the impact of curriculum and the way it is planned and taught in bringing about those outcomes.

·         Warnings against curriculum narrowing

In secondary schools, there is the same focus on sequential planning, but also criticism of any perceived curriculum narrowing or lack of entitlement, especially for SEND and disadvantaged pupils. Also under scrutiny are the two-year KS3, low EBacc uptake and sixth-formers who are not accessing work experience. This may be unsettling for many secondary schools who might feel they will now need a curriculum rethink to avoid Ofsted disapproval.

In primary schools, if pupils miss lessons for intervention sessions, a judgement may be made as to whether they are missing out too much on the full curriculum.

What about more able learners?

Kevin Sexton, Acting Headteacher at Challenge Award-accredited Chesterfield High School, shares the school’s use of learning journeys to support the development of character, culture and challenge throughout students’ career in education.

In our recent presentation at the NACE National Conference, we spoke about our use of learning journeys to support our focus on the three 3Cs used by the PiXL Club in school development – Currency, Character and Culture – as well as supporting our work with the NACE Challenge Framework to improve provision for more able learners and provide challenge for all.

For examples, you can view our school’s overall learning journey here and our learning journeys by subject here.

Looking beyond “currency” to focus on character, culture and challenge

The DfE’s 2017 report “Developing character skills in schools” found although 97% of surveyed schools claimed to promote desirable character traits, only 17% had a formalised plan or policy for this, less than half dedicated any time to staff training for character education, and fewer than a quarter had a dedicated lead for character development.

Currency (all data about the individual learner) will always be important. However, we also want our students to be better people. A newspaper article alerted me to statistics in the latest OECD report on health behaviour in school-aged children, which shared data on the percentage of 15-year-olds who agree that classmates are kind and helpful. The figure was 84% in the Netherlands, 82% in Iceland, 81% in Portugal 81%... and just 59% in England.

What success is it to have very academically successful students who do not know how to be kind or helpful to each other or those in the community around them? We wanted to plan a learning journey for our students that would give them opportunities to be challenged as they developed their character and culture. We asked ourselves:

• How do we ensure every young person has a chance to develop their character in this school?
• How will we celebrate young people developing their character?
• What work do we need to do with parents and other stakeholders?
• What will be included in a challenging character development programme at our school?
• What do we want more able learners to be like when they leave our school and move on?

The fourth C: adding “challenge” to the mix

Our involvement with NACE and use of the NACE Challenge Framework provided clarity on how character and culture could support currency; in some cases, it matched existing thinking and in others it inspired refreshing thinking. We used CPD time to look at key characteristics of more able learners across each subject. When completing the Challenge Framework audit, we looked at how we were enabling more able learners to show and develop their talents. We agreed that students who have developed key skills of leadership, organisation, resilience, initiative and communication (LORIC) do have better currency – both in terms of exam data and personal development data.

We discussed how we could use a learning journey to review our current character and culture programme, ask whether it leads to our “desirable end state” for students, identify gaps and introduce new strategies to bridge these gaps. Within this, we created learning journey opportunities that would match key aspects of the Challenge Framework and key characteristics that we were trying to develop for our more able learners. The learning journey model has also proved effective in keeping parents of more able learners involved in their performance both inside and outside the classroom – aligning with the focus on partnership, communication and rounded education emphasised by the Challenge Framework.

Developing a learning journey for your school

The learning journey model is designed to create a plan based on the 3Cs, spanning a learner’s whole school career. It should be understood by everyone in the school community, deliberately and explicitly shared and taught using a common language. It should create sequential activities and challenges which are open to everyone, of all abilities. Students are recognised and rewarded along their journey through schemes such as Duke of Edinburgh, Sports Leaders awards, and so on.

Here are five steps to develop a learning journey for your school:

1. Lead a session on character education for all staff, exploring its importance within subjects and across the whole school.
2.  Plot your current character and culture programme. As a group of staff or SLT, identify the gaps. What’s missing? Where does the new careers strategy need to be included (for example)? Does your learning journey lead to your school vision? Does it lead to the “desirable end state” for students?
3. On a blank learning journey template, plot out your school’s learning journey across all year groups ensuring all students are catered for.
4. Repeat this process for each year group, adding more detail.
5. Share your learning journeys with students, parents and staff so all stakeholders can see where learners are heading – in our case, from the start of Year 7 to the end of sixth form.

In line with the new education inspection framework, a learning journey gives you and your school a clear map of where your personal development work is going and how and why it is sequenced in such a way. When new demands come along or as cohorts change, you can review year by year to ensure you don’t lose direction. We have now used the same structure within specific departments, mapping out the 3Cs journey at departmental level and using this to support thinking around the “intent” aspect of the new framework.