The title of this post has again been generated by my morning train journey to work. As the guard asked us all to change this morning, I reflected on the further changes that came to us last week in the form of another new inspection framework and another new curriculum. To be honest, neither of these concern or worry me greatly; they are all challenges to be enjoyed and in all things my first concern is "will these changes make things better for the children?" Well, I genuinely think the answer to that is that we need to make them so.
Many of you will have heard of the curriculum which the government are keen to introduce from September 2014. It will, if we let it, remind me of my primary school days during the 1960s. Sitting in rows, learning facts, pages of maths questions, formal English, History from texts books and delivering learning to our children.
Now forgive me if this sounds a little maverick, but this is not the kind of education I could possibly wish on our children. Therefore the trick here is to make certain we are able to please Ofsted by proving we are covering the legalities of the curriculum as set out in law, but doing it in such a way that inspires the generation of children we have in our beloved school; and that is precisely what we are planning to do.
Last week we began the process of designing a brand new curriculum for first teaching in September 2014. This will take a great deal of time to get right and a large team of skilled teachers to do so. Our Inset Days in January will give us some time to focus on this together but a great deal of preparation will need to take place before then in order to ensure we create an outstanding curriculum for our children. As for the new Ofsted framework by which we will next be judged, we will leave that for another blog! In my next blog I will offer you an outline of the new curriculum and the ways in which we are planning to make it very special to our children.
