Meeting the needs of individual learners

Raising levels of achievement especially in English and Mathematics is now very high on the agenda of most schools and academies across the land.

Schools are being set challenging targets and are responding to these in many different ways. Traditionally schools review their curriculum during the autumn term with the view to making changes for the following academic year. In a few cases the challenge of raising achievement has been so great that the review has been done in the early part of the autumn term with a re-write of the timetable taking place for implementation in January of the same academic year.

In the example that is shown below an Ofsted inspection had identified serious under-achievement in Maths and English and it was felt that the curriculum offered to Y9 students was not conducive to meeting their individual needs or of motivating them to achieve. The School became an Academy in the September and a new Principal took up post. The Principal initiated an immediate review of the curriculum and the outcome was a decision to re-write the timetable for a fresh start in January.

In this model the Y9 population has been divided into 3 mini schools for the majority of their time. Each mini-school has a range of ability of learners. Within each mini-school the intention is to have a F, M and S group within each of Maths, Science and English. Thus an able Mathematician can be in any one of the mini-schools.

In Pathway 1 an able Mathematician could be in Maths set F, English set S and Science set 3 for example. This possibility exists in all 3 pathways.

Equally an able learner for English could be in any of the pathways and be in English set F, Science set M and Maths set S.

In this model History, Geography and RE were combined into Humanities and reduced from 5 periods a week to 2. This allowed an option group to be offered. The separate humanities subjects can form part of the option block alongside other subjects. The option group is designed to give learners the opportunity to take an examination at the end of Y9 or for this to be the start of a KS4 programme of study.

Is your school re-designing their curriculum?
If your school is looking to change the curriculum for a year group or several year groups and would like to discuss anything further please contact MIST Services. MIST Services works with many schools, colleges and Academies each academic year, ultimately being exposed to literally hundreds of curriculums and timetabling problems.