Lets get right to the point – the Primary Curriculum is a mess ! …there’s no better way to put it – and successive failed attempts to put things right have just compounded this situation.
Out of the curriculum pond; schools have to try to make some sense of it all and implement everything as successfully as they can…which is why the results are more often than not an overload of work for all members of staff from Headteacher downwards and an overload of expectations with regard to curriculum delivery and success.
So lets take a look at one aspect of this mess and try to make some sort of sense of it …
How do we get some balance of teaching time across all the curriculum subjects?
The situation regarding this area has slightly eased from a few years ago. In earlier times OFSTED would visit and actively check that the school was actually managing to reach the acceptable teaching times that had been decreed! This was 23.5 hrs KS2 and 21.0 hrs KS1 – and let me tell you it wasn’t easy to get to these times…and involved (theoretically!) squeezing minutes out here there and everywhere. Of course this happened when OFSTED were in but hey schools can’t time manage to that extent all the time!
Take a look at a document that I drew up some years ago which outlined the teaching times for each subject in a term – yes I know its not bang up to date but you can get the idea of what type of document you need and also the approximate loadings for each subject…in other words which subjects are given teaching time priority.
This sort of arrangement shows how many hours you need to Timetable each week for each subject and we will be looking at timetabling at a later date. It also shows the accumulated times for each subject over a term. You can again notice that we are working on 10 week terms. If you have read my other posts you will remember that I said “in reality planning for 10 weeks will take 12 weeks to deliver due to all the extra’s that occur during a term.” The Autumn term is just the same as really we devote 2 weeks to Christmas so it sort of reduces the term time anyway!
You will remember at the beginning of this article I said the curriculum was a mess and that it was overloaded.
So lets take a reality check and talk about subjects that sometimes don’t get taught too often….its a sticky subject but it happens due to the pressure on the taught day – its not your fault it just is a practicality!
Subjects that get slipped !
- Design tech – often replaced by all Art teaching
- Music – class music is in decline and creative inclusion of whole school singing practice by management doesn’t really count!
- R.E – probably the first to let slip unless you have a different teacher in to teach this
- PSHE – I am still not convinced by PSHE in Primary schools
- IT – how many schools are now letting this slip due to lack of equipment funding?
Subjects you should never let slip!
- Science – many Primary teachers are not confident to teach science and now it is not in the SAT’s it is starting to get left out…..get a good reference book and get confident . Its a great subject that the kids love!
- Geography – often loses out to History focussed themes – but really needs to be brought to the forefront again. Personally I cant stand the dull comparison of home and some mud huts in Africa….it can be much more exciting than that!
Get creative with teaching times
Now that you know how long each term you can spend on each subject then you can start to get a little more creative. (This is usually applied to afternoons only)
Why not teach all your teaching time for a subject over a period of 2 weeks – perhaps every afternoon. It really allows the children to “get into” a topic or focus and can produce some fantastic results. So just how do we do this?
Its quite easy
- On a sheet of A4 create a grid where the subjects can be listed down the left hand side and hours can be counted across the top
- Colour in the panel which shows the total hours allowed for that subject in each term
- As you use the hours for the subjects you have chosen colour them in until you reach the finish point where you have no more allocated teaching time for that subject
- As you can now see – if you wish to do a week every afternoon teaching science then you can – it will eat into your terms science hours but that doesn’t matter so long as you don’t exceed the termly allocation.
- As you are (for example) replacing history with science and perhaps R.E with science for a short time it doesn’t matter as once your science hours are used then that time can be allocated to subjects that were omitted for a short time.
here’s a quick example of how it looks before hours are coloured in
So that about wraps it up on the balanced curriculum. Have a go at getting creative by using the last sheet shown and let me know some of the exciting things you have been up to.
Charles