February 2022 Blog Rob Herd

Date: 5th Apr 2022 @ 3:50pm

One of the best parts about being a governor is going into school and seeing plans in action. Our expert teachers at Boughton Heath are really successful in delivering a curriculum that matches the needs of our learners. In my role as the governor with responsibility for curriculum and assessment, I visited school last week to see what has been put in place over the past year. 

I am always taken by the teaching profession’s ability to be introspective and reflect on what is working well and what could be built on. There is a constant desire to be better; a constant evolution of the content delivered to children. None more so than at Boughton Heath. 

Some real work has been put in this year around sequencing, that is what come where in the curriculum and why it is taught in that place. The bulk of the curriculum is delivered through fascinating topic areas. I wanted to go and sit in some of the lessons to learn what was happening. Who knew that studying Norfolk could be so enticing?!  

I was so reassured to find out that skills that are taught in one topic are revisited later in the curriculum. Children are children – curious and forgetful. It is unrealistic to expect every learner to absorb the knowledge, skills or competences shown to them on the first go. Looking at the curriculum at Boughton Heath, there are so many opportunities to find out where gaps in knowledge are and revisit them in further detail to refresh our children’s minds. 

This diversity in the curriculum and assurance of embedding vital knowledge will set the children at Boughton Heath up for an incredibly successful secondary school career. I am a secondary school teacher and I know that having frames of reference for knowledge is a vital aspect of being able to take on more information at secondary level. It is really professionally reassuring to know that learners coming from Boughton Heath are being given a curriculum that gives them the foundation they need for the future. 

When looking through some student work, one thing that shone out was that there has been a real evolution in creativity in classwork. I must be one of the only teachers that likes messy books; it shows where mistakes have been. None of the books I looked at were messy by a long chalk, but there were signs that children had been rereading, redrafting, recreating pieces of work. There is no better sign that learners at Boughton Heath are being challenged by the content that is delivered to them. It is through this development, particularly in arts subjects, that you can really start to see creative personalities come through and it is wonderful to see creative talent being promoted and successfully embedded in the curriculum. 

I am a member of the LGBT+ community and I often think about the strides of progress that we have made in being accepting of people from all walks of life in schools. The No Outsiders programme is fully embedded through school and you can see it seasoning each and every topic and display board. It really does pervade school life. I have no doubt that all of the children at Boughton Heath will feel safer and more comfortable in being themselves because of the No Outsiders programme. 

Finally, I have to credit the two students who I met and spoke to whilst I was conducting the visit. Mr Lenton pulled two unsuspecting students from class following a spontaneous request. With no time to prepare the students, both of them sat opposite me, unphased. What a level of resilience at such an early age! You could be forgiven for thinking that they had taken some kind of qualification in teaching, as both of the students were so aware about what they were learning that they articulated it in near-perfect responses. If Mr Lenton hadn’t been with me for an hour beforehand, I would have thought he’d have spent half an hour prepping them outside. When a learner gives you such an insightful response about what they are learning, incorporating the content, skills and metacognition that the students showed to me on that day, that’s a real sign of a quality curriculum being delivered by quality staff. 

Thank you so much to everyone who worked hard to accommodate my visit.