Instinctively, we understand that knowledge gaps can be hugely detrimental for learners. They can trigger cumulative dysfluency, attendance and wellbeing issues and lifelong under-achievement. But preventing them from arising – and closing them when they do – is less instinctive.
With attendance at a low nationally and a youth mental health crisis, this matters a great deal. Knowledge gaps can grow to the point where a child completely gives up on learning. Poor attendance may cause them to arise, but they can soon become causes of poor attendance and even school refusal in their own right.
I think of it as a Jenga tower. If too many pieces are missing, the whole edifice collapses. Our job as educators is to check that every level is full and secure before new knowledge is layered on.
As a trust, we have put that checking front and centre of the support we offer. Here’s how.
Total recall
We’ve fully embraced Kirschner, Sweller and Clark dictum that ‘if nothing has changed in long-term memory, nothing has been learned’. So we encourage our staff to keep checking that knowledge they’ve taught weeks, months and even years ago has been remembered.
A key challenge was the sheer weight of curriculum and its attendant risk of knowledge overload. Our teachers were struggling to be clear about what to prioritise, and this was sometimes leading to activity for its own sake.
Staff have filleted the curriculum down to focus on key knowledge required to understand future learning and concepts within a subject, and key knowledge required to learn in other subjects.
Check point
Based on these streamlined curriculums, we then worked with school and subject leaders to draw on research findings and construct an assessment framework based on pupils knowing, remembering and applying more knowledge.
In our primary schools in particular, assessment often lacked regularity and cohesion. There was little evidence of the criteria schools were assessing against, and little to no information about foundation subjects was being sent to secondary schools.
So we introduced a simple scale that class teachers could use to check and report on where individual and class-wide knowledge gaps might be.
For example, a teacher might want to check in January that the knowledge they taught in November is still accessible to their pupils. Our simple 1-4 scale for recording enables teachers to check which knowledge has stuck and what needs revisiting in a formative way.
As above, so below
It’s not just pupils who can have gaps in their knowledge. It can happen to teachers too, especially those who are expected to keep abreast of multiple subjects. So the trust also gives teachers the opportunity to grade their own knowledge and confidence in each subject/topic.
When gaps are flagged up, leaders and the trust’s school improvement directorate put in support through professional development activities.
Importantly, this self-assessment mechanism is by no means a ‘big stick’; it’s simply for internal use to help teachers to further improve.
The big picture
Introducing a robust assessment framework carries the risk of additional staff workload. We’ve mitigated that by limiting summative data collection to two data drops per year. As an added benefit, the collated information flows straight through into pupil reports, thus actually saving time.
It’s what we can do with that data that really counts. Our trust’s data expert, Becky Hill, skilfully collates it and our Power BI dashboards allow us to look at individuals or class groups. Heads and subject leaders can look across the school and we can see whole-trust data by subject.
All of this allows us to spot and tackle trends for individuals and groups, including disadvantaged children, pupils with SEND, or pupils with English as a second language.
This is an iterative process, and so far it has been better adopted by our primary schools. But we know that our secondaries are already seeing the benefits of the richer information they receive from our primaries.
That’s a good sign that the base of our Jenga tower is stable. So we continue to build.
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