If you strip everything back, what truly matters in providing a high-quality education?
I have pondered this question over many years and I’ve concluded there is no definitive answer. A high-quality curriculum clearly matters, but that’s not entirely in schools’ hands. The safety and wellbeing of the children in our care is fundamental, but it’s not sufficient.
From a purely educational angle, our view at Halliard Trust is that what is vital is to have teachers with strong subject knowledge in the subject(s) that they teach, combined with an excellent understanding and awareness of how best to transmit that knowledge.
This is entirely in our hands, and it is how we build on our culture of safeguarding towards good outcomes for all.
Among these, the non-negotiable outcome is that all children learn knowledge and skills that stay with them forever. Not just to the point of a test or exam. I mean genuinely for the rest of their lifetime.
Highly-skilled teaching, rooted in research, is how we secure this. But it’s not that simple.
In secondary schools, staff tend to teach a subject they are expert in. But that’s not always the case. Increasingly, they may me asked to teach one or more other subjects that are at best tangential to their expertise.
Meanwhile, primary school teachers really feel the pinch. They are often expected to deliver nine or ten different subjects. Can they really be a master of all of them?
So how can we ensure that all teachers are able to improve their subject knowledge and pedagogical expertise in line with today’s demands?
In our schools, at the start of each year, each teacher maps out the different subjects and topics they will be expected to teach.
Against each topic, they self-grade the strength of their subject knowledge on a 1-5 scale. They do the same to rate their confidence in teaching that unit to a high standard. (Surprisingly, perhaps, these grades don’t always align.)
Initially, staff were reluctant to submit low grades
This data is then shared with school and/or subject leaders, who can support teachers to upskill against either or both of their scores.
For example, if a teacher was due to deliver PE, and graded themselves at 2 or 3 in the ‘gymnastics’ content they were due to teach, the school leader can tailor their support to that element.
This could be take the form of assistance in lesson planning, a discussion to iron out misconceptions or direct support in delivering lessons.
In some cases, particularly in our smaller schools, leadership expertise to develop staff subject knowledge or pedagogical expertise is simply not available on site. In these instances, we engage our trust-wide network of subject leaders to provide further support.
At trust level, we collect this ‘1-5’ data to identify subject areas that teachers feel the least confident teaching, or tend to know less about. This allows us to provide more comprehensive central support and CPD if required.
Once the teacher has delivered the unit of learning, they may decide to upgrade their 1-5 score based on the impact of the support they received. Feedback strongly indicates that acknowledging the positive evidence of impact is rewarding for the teacher receiving the support and the leader providing it alike.
Initially, and understandably, staff were reluctant to submit low grades. But they are now reassured that they are trusted – that school leaders and the wider trust are there to support them to improve their teaching, not to judge their aptitude.
We are now well into year two of this approach and we’ve seen significant, positive impact on upskilling our staff in computing (especially the coding element) and design and technology.
In turn, our latest assessment data drops are showing that pupils are beginning to know and remember more of the key knowledge they are taught in these subjects.
Teachers’ expertise in all of the subject content they teach is not the only piece of the high-quality education puzzle – but it is an easy one to overlook.
Unless we focus sharply on it (in addition to high-quality training in overarching pedagogy and assessment), our teachers and our pupils are likely to underachieve. And that’s a heavy price to pay.
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