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“The curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning and employment”

Ofsted inspection framework 2019

The recent OFSTED focus on curriculum intent, implementation and impact may have frustrated some, but now I’m outside of Ofsted’s reach, I’ve been able just to take advantage of the response to it. The UK Edutwitter world has been awash with great resources and discussions for me as a new HOD looking to refine our KS3 curriculum.

Having settled on a thematic approach to KS3, I was happy to find my reasoning justified by Anthony Cockerill’s carefully considered blog on curriculum, which I shared with my department. Claire Hill’s exploration of curriculum as corsetry is also worth a read! Recently, Barbara Bleiman’s NATE keynote struck a chord with me too. Her concerns about the legacy of PEE style writing prompts and discussions of Applebee’s work in particular resonate with what we’re trying to achieve:

As exam boards and English teachers so often note, young people often struggle to see the ‘big picture’ in texts. (Alex Quigley has, as always, written insightfully about this at GCSE here.) I remember arriving at university to study literature with no clue what my bewilderingly well-spoken counterparts were on about when they talked about Marxist readings or postmodernism. Perhaps we have a responsibility to embed at least the idea of connections between literary texts at KS3, ready to populate this concept with further knowledge later on.

Many of my students will go to university in the UK or college in the US, so I feel an extra responsibility to ensure that they do not have to face an academic culture shock on top of the difficulty of assimilating to life in a new country. For many schools in this region, equipping students with knowledge of ‘the best that has been thought and said’ really does mean the thoughts and words of dead, white men. While I have obvious concerns about the way this is sometimes done without encouraging students to consider and perhaps critique the canon, it does mean that these students from Asian countries arrive in the UK just as equipped to talk about Shakespeare and Dickens as their British counterparts, if not more so. I’ve already posted about how we used text mapping to check the breadth and diversity of the texts we plan to teach at KS3, but this variety also creates another potential pitfall. Will they get enough of the classics to compete? And, if we are to range across history, geography and form, how can we expect students to build a sense of where each text fits into the body of literature?

We wanted to build in explicit opportunities for students to draw connections between texts. After all, this is what makes a great reader. It also has important cognitive benefits. In my imagined future dream school, students will be such keen readers that they have a wealth of shared literary knowledge to draw on to make such connections. However, in the meantime, if we can make one or two of these links very obvious, we are hopefully paving the way for students to make their own independent links too.

Literary Connections

Although we have arranged our curriculum around larger ideas, we didn’t quite want to reduce these categories to themes, so came up with the label ‘connections’ instead. In fact, we hope to encourage students to draw connections between the connections too, given that the list itself is quite interconnected.

• Heritage
• Power
• Relationships
• Journeys
• Dystopia
• War and Peace

Each of these ‘connections’ will be repeated twice over the course of KS3 and can be easily linked to GCSE texts too. I’m also in the process of making wider reading lists for each connection too and hope to make posters for my classroom where students can fill in texts they’d recommend that they think link to one of them.

Although I’ve also read a few persuasive thoughts about teaching literature chronologically, I’m yet to be convinced that this is necessary or useful. Instead, we plan to use our first unit in Year 7 to foreground some key literary periods and movements. Although this unit only uses extracts of texts, we hope that it will give students a basic map with which to form connections as they move through the rest of the curriculum. As I mentioned in this previous post, we’ll also be teaching Year 7 about debates around the canon in this first unit, encouraging them to question their texts too.