HSAEL News

The Summer term is a teacher’s favourite. Amidst standing outside on duty in sunglasses, saying final goodbyes to Year 11 and Year 13, trip days, sports days and wear your own clothes days, it can become very easy to become a bit like the Grasshopper who sang all summer.

At HSAEL, whilst we have been enjoying the traditions that bring our academic year to a close, we have also been sure to use our CPD and gained time to reflect on the progress we have made on our mission to make every child a leader in their chosen field and to think radically about the curricula we are choosing to teach our students. Just like the busy ants collecting their wheat for winter, we have been busy preparing for September.

Find the rationale behind our approach and philosophy for the 2024-2025 HSAEL curriculum.

1. Know where you have been. Know where you are going.

Define the end goal. Not every child should and will end up attending Oxbridge, however it is mission critical that our curriculum programmes have trajectories that lead to these types of destinations. For our HoD’s, this has meant reviewing undergraduate courses at some of the top institutions across the world to ensure we are best preparing students for these flight paths. This also includes looking at the KS2 national curriculums and the curriculums of our local feeder schools to consider what our students will know when they arrive with us. We must meet children where they are not on a pre-conceived notion of what we think they can already do.

2. You can’t build a house on weak foundations.

KS3 is the foundation of your house, and these years need to be solid. Master the basics. Students need to be able to recall huge amounts of knowledge. Once they can, think radically about what skills you want students to be able to master in these formative years. Crucially, never over-estimate how much time you have with students, how many practices they will need or how long it will take some students to be able to achieve the basics.

3. Launch the trebuchet. Unblock the drain.

What do students not know? What do students struggle with? Start there. Be radical with your long-term planning. I repeat be radical. Teach times tables in Maths for the whole of Year 7 if necessary. Spend a whole term in History looking only at sources until every child knows what one is, the content, the provenance, the nature, origin and purpose. Make sure every student in Year 7 can locate the seven continents and five oceans on a map before moving on.

4. Golden threads.

Schmoker[i] calls these ‘power standards’. The Golden Threads are the distillation of your subject down to its very essence. You can see the threads in Year 7 and in Year 13 lessons. You would be able to see the threads post-graduate study.  These threads will be woven throughout your entire curriculum; they will build and blur into each other as difficulty increases but must be concentrated first to increase the accuracy of your instruction. In history, this looks like:

Explaining second order concepts: change, continuity, causation, consequence, similarity and difference.

Source inference and utility

Evaluating interpretations

Recalling specific and detailed knowledge

Reaching substantiated judgements

5. Pathways

Students are grouped by age and that might be the only thing they have in common. Differences in student starting point can be seismic. They are not a problem. Students with lower starting points can still be successful. They should still be celebrated. From September, students will be streamed into Alpha, Beta and Gamma pathways. Each pathway has a bespoke set of learning objectives student’s will be aiming to achieve in each subject. The end goal is broadly the same; the success criteria is differentiated. Our visit to Forest Gate Community School helped us firm up this concept; in September, DPR will help teachers track student progress towards these objectives lesson by lesson. Teaching and learning are important but assessment is vital. 

6. Golden Nuggets. They’re ye-ha!

Teachers test students on the most important knowledge at the start of every term. They do not start the new learning until these terms are mastered. See more on this here.

Similarly, students complete look, cover, write, check on the key terms in for each subject weekly.

7. Milestones and refinement.

Every 6-8 lessons teaching stops. Students are tested. The Section A of their milestone will ask them to recall the core knowledge they have been practising in lessons and for homework. The Section B asks students to apply this knowledge to an isolated skill. These milestones must be nimble: what is the smallest amount of assessment to unearth the maximum amount of useful data? Do no more. A great curriculum should support workload and wellbeing.

8. Isolate the skill.

We used diving into a swimming pool to help staff understand this one. If you aim was to teach a child to dive into a swimming pool, you will just teach them how to dive breaking the skill down in manageable chunks. They would practise. They would perform the dive. You would give them feedback. They would practice again. You would give them feedback.

Too often in lessons, teachers try and teach students in just one lesson how to dive, swim front crawl, backstroke, breaststroke, push and glide, sitting diving, kneeling dive… all at the same time.

9.  The HSAEL curriculum begins with students mastering the most important pieces of knowledge. This knowledge is then built upon at home for independent learning. Only once a core body of knowledge has been learnt can students begin to join the dots between this knowledge to begin to develop understanding. This schema is essential and only once this has been established can students begin to apply their knowledge to questions that require skill which will become increasingly harder over time. Once students have mastered both knowledge and skill, they can begin to add additional knowledge to their domain using wider, harder and more conceptual sources. Completing this learning journey would be students being provided with real world examples and experiencing what they have learnt first hand through Character Education Days at museums, at talks, on trips to beaches, parks, industries and businesses. 

The HSAEL approach and philosophy for the 2024-2025 curriculum.