What is Senior Curriculum Leadership

Complete the interactive activities in the Seneca app to work towards your CPD certificate.

Senior Curriculum Leadership

Session 4.3 of this course is based on Christine Counsell's ideas. You can read more in her blog The Dignity of the Thing.

When most people think about curriculum, they think of one for each subject.
According to Christine Counsell, this is because organizing knowledge in subjects is a very traditional way of schooling.
- Each subject comes with its own content, rules, organization, goals.
However, she thinks that there is room for a senior curriculum leadership, even if that person does not know all subjects in detail.

The isolation of subjects - according to Counsell - worsens some of the most common issues in schools, such as flawed assessment systems, trouble attracting and retaining teachers, developing effective CPD, and problematic interpretation of student data.
Most SLTs worry about how something is taught and learned, but not about what is being taught and learned.

Although we know that some learning techniques work effectively, such as retrieval practice, it is still necessary to know what is being retrieved, as the associations between pieces of content can be made differently, depending on the subject.
Thus, SLT should not propose generic pedagogical strategies without taking into consideration the specificities of each subject.
- As Rosalind Walker says, whole-school directives can actually "contort and corrupt" teaching.

When SLT get involved with curriculum planning and development, progress, assessment and outcomes also get better.

When we discuss data in schools, we should also be discussing curriculum.
If we know what is being taught and see the curriculum as a progression model, we can better analyse and act on the data.

Christine Counsell suggests that it is normal that most SLT meetings about progress and attainment are not focused on the curriculum.
- The school needs to work as a whole organism, and SLT need to propose measures that facilitate the work of all teachers. So, it makes sense that they are not thinking about subjects when analysing data and student progress.
However, this approach comes with a serious risk: strategies and decisions become too generic to work in such different subjects.

One difficulty in senior leadership curriculum is that an SLT member who is a History teacher will probably not understand the Maths curriculum in depth - and vice versa.
So, as Counsell suggests, we need a curricular language, based on a knowledge base that helps teachers from all backgrounds to effectively discuss assessment and progress.