It’s now official, with the election of a Labour government in the UK, oracy is now the Next Big Thing about to preoccupy schools in England. (England rather than the UK as a whole, because authority for education is devolved to each of the four nations in the United Kingdom, so this is about England rather than Scotland, Northern Ireland or Wales)  This is not a bad thing at all, except in the way that all Next Big Things can be bad things in that schools often rush to adopt superficial aspects rather than engaging deeply with the underlying rationale in a way that genuinely makes things better. Many schools have a regrettable tendency to prioritise observable and auditable actions over fostering deep understanding of strategies introduced with the best of intentions. In what follows, I will attempt to set out how we might think about oracy in ways that strengthen our educational offer as well as highlighting ways in which these might be mutated into unhelpful ends.

Oracy is a curricular as well as pedagogical concern

James Mannion, one of the authors of the Oracy Skills Framework, writes that oracy is more than learning through talk.  Children also need to be taught how to talk.  Indeed James writes that perhaps it would have been better to call the oracy skills framework the oracy skills and knowledge framework and that ‘there is a significant body of knowledge that underpins the development of spoken language and communication,’[1].  Oracy is both a curricular and  a pedagogical concern. Intelligent thinking about oracy therefore need to reflect upon the roles (plural) of speaking and of listening in pedagogy and its roles in the various subject curricula. Oracy is not a ‘thing’ that we do in a performative ‘look-at-us-doing-oracy’ dance, it is a range of teaching practices, whole school routines and subject specific curricular objects.  Hence oracies not oracy.

There are broadly three main reasons why oracy is advocated. The first is around self-confidence. Education, it is argued,  should enable children to develop into self-confident individuals who can communicate with ease in a range of social situations, beyond the narrow confines of their peer group. Children should feel able to express their ideas, ask questions, voice opinions, engage in conversation with an unfamiliar person or group of people and do all of these constructively and effectively with the requisite politeness the situation demands.

The second reason is about teamwork and collaboration. Education should enable children to work with others to achieve goals.  For this to happen children need to be able to participate in a discussion as an equal partner, listening attentively, building on the contributions of others and disagreeing amicably when appropriate.  It is about balancing one’s own self-confidence with the right of other voices to be heard.  We might note, in passing, that at least in part,  the first of these is about encouraging the more reticent to speak, the second is about reminding the more loquacious to listen!

These first two reasons have both pedagogical and curricular implications. Having regular opportunities to learn through talk, whether through routines such as talk partners, or group work or whole class discussion, provide contexts within which speaking and listening can be applied. However, students also need to learn how to talk and how to listen. When explicit teaching about this is omitted, and children just left to get on with it, this is very likely to go wrong. As the oracy skills [and knowledge] framework reminds us, there are four major strands of learning to speak and listen well; the physical, the social emotional, the linguistic and the cognitive. While the linguistic and cognitive may be included within subject teaching, the physical and social emotional may well be overlooked, or assumed to be ‘natural’ so not in need of explicit teaching.  In the same way that schools should  have a behaviour curriculum that teaches children the detail of how to behave in a pro-social, pro-learning manner, schools should also explicitly teach the physical and social emotional granular detail of how to speak and listen well. One reason this may be overlooked is that outside of the Foundation Stage, it does not have an identified curricular ‘home’, though the English, drama and PHSE curricula all provide natural contexts for explicit teaching about how to speak and listen. This learning can then be consolidated and applied across the curriculum, when appropriate in pedagogical and curriculum terms.  Explicit structures and expectations such as outlined in accountable talk or habits of discussion, can scaffold and reinforce this prior learning.

The third  reason is around learning effectively. There is substantial evidence that oral language competence underpins cognitive development; talking and thinking being intimately entwinned. [2]  Below, oracy as pedagogy  expands upon how oracy can be deployed pedagogically to strengthen learning by enabling checking for understanding, developing fluency in the language of analytic thought and by causing children to think hard and think with taught content.

A fourth seldom expressed reason is that to different degrees depending on the subject, the omission of learning how to communicate orally does violence to the essence of that subject.  Drama without speaking and listening is unthinkable, learning a modern foreign language without learning how speak it and understand its spoken form is an emaciated form of language learning. The study of English is seriously impoverished unless it includes study of the spoken word as well as the written word. The extent to which the internal logic of other subjects should include curricular objects concerning speaking and listening is discussed later. This is separate from discussion of the use of oracy as pedagogy. Muddled thinking about whether oracy is being used for curricular or pedagogical reasons is a sure sign that things are about to go very wrong. The section on oracy as curriculum expands upon this.

Oracy as pedagogy

Teachers have a range of pedagogical tools at their disposal and are faced with the professional challenge of making judicious choices about which tools are best suited to which tasks, subjects and age of pupil and at which point in a lesson.[3] There is an opportunity cost to any decision. To choose to use speaking means there is less time to apply writing or digital skills for example, and in a given situation writing or a digital technological tool might be a more effective choice for learning something than the alternatives. The rationale behind such decisions is not often articulated and yet being able to  weight and justify one’s pedagogical choices is the best insurance against their misapplication. Given that oracy is often advocated in the belief that getting pupils to justify their assertions is an inherent good, then we should expect proponents of oracy to be eloquent at justifying their pedagogical choices.

Building belonging

There are a raft of reasons for using oracy as a pedagogical tool.  First of all, the use of oracy in the classroom can be done in such a way as to build a sense of belonging and of shared purpose in a way that is superior to using alternatives such as writing or digital technology. Which is not to say that neither writing nor digital technology cannot also be used in the service of building belonging – for example online writing collaboration tools allow these two to be used in combination. However, oracy has a particularly strong contribution in building belonging. After all, we use expressions such as ‘having a voice’ and ‘being heard’ as crucial aspects of being respected as a person. The language we speak is a central part of our sense of  identity.  Therefore, being listened to, having one’s voice respected and valued should be a fundamental part of every school’s ethos. The oracy benchmarks of Voice 21 has as its second benchmark the valuing of every voice.

‘ The teacher supports all students to participate in, and benefit from, oracy in the classroom. The teacher listens meaningfully to students, encouraging them to develop their ideas further, and creates a culture in which students do the same.’

Doug Lemov in his book Reconnect for Meaning, Purpose and Belonging writes about teaching that amplifies the signals of belonging. He discusses pedagogical routines such as turn and talk and habits of discussion as ways of building a sense of belonging, valuing every child’s voice and providing a context for children to learn to expand upon and justify their reasoning. A classroom with the emotional safety that enables every child to share their voice is a classroom where is it safe to take risks and make mistakes.

Clearly, building belonging is important in its own right. There is however a further contribution that a sense of belonging provides – though it sounds a little  instrumentalist if not outlined without first stressing its non-instrumental moral necessity.  Feeling you belong is one aspect of what drives motivation and teaching is much more effective – and rewarding – with motivated learners than with unmotivated learners.

Checking for understanding

A second reason why a teacher might make a decision to use oracy as a pedagogical choice is in order to check for understanding. Learning is invisible so teachers rely on proxies in order to try and work out if their teaching is having the desired learning outcome. There are three main ways teachers could check for understanding; children could write their answers, possibly on a mini whiteboard, children could choose an option either on a digital device or by using a physical signal, moving to a certain place, showing a coloured car or number of fingers or whatever, or by talking – to a partner or to the class as a whole. All of these have their merits and drawbacks.

Choosing options is only suitable for simple yes/no, true/false or multiple-choice questions, but because it is an all-learner response system, (as opposed to asking for ‘hands up who knows the answer routines’), it gives the teacher instant data on the extent of understanding across the class as a whole. This is powerful data which empowers the teacher to  flex their teaching in the moment to address misconceptions. 

Writing on a mini white board or quizzing technology such as Carousel allows for slightly longer answers and still provides the opportunity for the teacher to check for understanding. The challenge of so doing increases with the length of the answer, so there is a law of diminishing returns here once answers become longer than a simple sentence.

Similarly, using talk partners allows for  both short and slightly longer answers and provides a context for teachers to sample understanding across the class if used alongside all learner response systems such a cold calling (done warmly, naturally).

This may make it sound as if checking for understanding involves questions with simple, closed answers is in some way inferior to asking a question that involves a longer, more open answer. This is not the case. Closed questions play a vital role in checking and reinforcing key knowledge and in building confidence with subject content, both of which underpin a learner’s ability to answer a more open-ended question.

It is usually easier to check for understanding when asking an open-ended question by using spoken answers as a means of participation than the above alternatives. However, as there usually are with pedagogical decisions, there is a trade-off to be made.  Put simply, a teacher can either attend to one learner giving a longer answer or many learners giving short written or signalled answers. Both have their place, depending on whether the teacher wants to know whether everybody understands or whether child X specifically understands. (There are of course  reasons other than checking for understanding for engaging in extended, probing verbal exchanges with one child.)

In practice, teachers manage these different trade-offs by using techniques in combination. For example, an all-learner response system such as using mini white boards or a multiple-choice quiz is used and then the teacher selects a child to answer verbally. Another strategy is using what Adam Boxer calls ‘indicator’ children, those children who the teacher is aware are more likely to find learning more challenging and use these children as a way of sampling understanding more generally.

Proponents of dialogic teaching such as Robin Alexander, for example, are dismissive of checking for understanding routines, or what they call IRF (Initiation by the teacher; Response by a student of students; Feedback from the teacher).  Checking for understanding is disparaged as  ‘reporting on someone else’s thinking  rather than think[ing] for themselves.’[4]  However, checking for understanding is a vital tool in an inclusive classroom and has a specific rationale: that of providing the teacher with information about whether they need to clarify or give more practice to an area of learning. The idea that ‘thinking for themselves’ is possible without deep immersion in ‘someone else’s thinking’ is somewhat fanciful and seems to dismiss the foundational role of knowledge in thinking. Unless we are expecting each and every child to rediscover the cumulative legacy of human meaning making afresh then learning other people’s thinking is here to stay. Be very wary of those who are dismissive of the power and necessity of oral checking for understanding routines and who are overly enthusiastic about open-ended, exploratory discussion to the exclusion of anything else. Open-ended exploratory talk is important both pedagogically and in terms of the curriculum in some subjects, but it is not the only thing that is important.

Speaking: writing co–dependencies

A third pedagogical reason for using oracy is to enable learners to reframe and extend their initial thoughts into a more formal speech mode. Formal speech has structural and lexical differences with conversational speech and is inextricably linked with writing.  I have written about this in detail in this blog which  I really urge you to read in order to fully understand the co-dependency that exists between speaking and writing.

The formal mode is the communication mode that is optimised for analytical thought. It uses sentence-based idiom and technical vocabulary and is more polished – more formal – than its conversational progenitor. Sometimes such language is described as being ‘higher quality’ or ‘better.’ [5]  But these adjectives are context specific – a more formal full sentence is better in some contexts and inappropriate in others. In the classroom, there will be many occasions when we wants students to recast their initial, fleeting thoughts into something more polished, more considered and more analytical. Here, exploratory talk gives space for the learner to reflect upon and recast their initial thoughts into something more organised. It gives space for thought to be listened to by others, questioned, and developed further.

Academic language – whether written or spoken –  is written in sentences. Conversational language is not. Exploratory talk in the classroom provides a way of bouncing between the two.  Respect the role of both in communication. Be wary of approaches that either insist that children speak in full sentences all the time, or who conversely do not appreciate the need to be able to talk in full sentences when it is appropriate to do so.

Being able to communicate in sentence-based idiom is no one’s natal tongue. Learning to do so requires thoughtful scaffolding as well as many, many opportunities to practice. Just giving curriculum time to children talking together without scaffolding is not going to enable them to learn how to communicate in this new idiom.  To paraphrase James Britton’s oft cited , ‘sentence-based writing floats on a sea of sentence-based talk!’ If you can’t say it in full sentences, you can’t write it in full sentences. The fact that in conversation we do not speak in full sentences is a complete red herring. There is a valuable place for exploration of ideas in the classroom that does not insist in full sentences  and there is also a perhaps even more valuable role for learning to articulate ideas in formal academic mode. There is also a curricular dimension to articulating thought in more formal idiom because not only the vocabulary but also the grammar choices are deeply shaped by the subject within which one is communicating. This is examined below.

(I urge you once again to read this blog where I expand upon this in more detail.)

Thinking hard

A fourth, closely allied pedagogical reason for using talk in the classroom is that it has the potential, done well, to  enable learners to think hard – or think with – the content that has been shared with them. It also has the potential to enable learners to avoid thinking hard, particularly because the transient nature of a class full of students all taking at once provides is hard for teachers to monitor whether or not this hard thinking is actually taking place. Unless a teacher is skilled in pre-emptive strategies to address this,  a class full of talking students provides easy cover for students seeking to avoid the hard work of thinking. Such pre-emptive strategies for creating an ethos for productive talk exist and need to be understood, modelled and practised if the use of talk is going to be pedagogically productive. For example,

‘Accountable Talk practices are not something that spring spontaneously from students’ mouths. It takes time and effort to create an Accountable Talk classroom environment in which this kind of talk is a valued norm. It requires teachers to guide and scaffold student participation.’[6]

These caveats aside, talk between peers has the potential to get students thinking hard about content. When students think with content – having to mentally translate it from one context to another – in this case from the teacher’s words into their own words and the words of their peers, this involves the kind of effortful thinking likely to lead to effective learning.

Using talk as a way of getting students to think hard – and think with – content, using talk, can also be structured through skilled extended probing, sometimes of just one student, with other students attentively listening – and benefitting – from the exchange. For some, this is the oracy motherlode.

The advocacy oracy providing the means for children to  ‘think for themselves’ warrants some unpicking because there is often a conflation between two different concepts occurring when it is championed. There is a first sense in which it means something like ‘make sense of what you have just learnt by integrating it within your preexisting mental schema, making new links.’ It involves the learner engaging in cognitive activity  – what I have called thinking with new content above, in order to make sense of it. Generative learning strategies, as researched by Fiorella and Meyer, are ways of enabling such thinking and often either involve talk or have the potentially to be done in pairs or small groups using talk.

The second sense is more about having your own opinion about something, making decisions whether to accept or reject a proposal, justifying one’s line of reasoning and so on. However, such considerations take us deep into curricular territory. Voicing opinions, for example, forms a larger part of the cognitive architecture of some subjects than others and so the amount of time deployed should vary accordingly. Voicing one’s opinion of the meaning of a poem is an integral part of the English curriculum; voicing one’s opinion about whether or not F=ma is not part of what it is to learn physics.

At this point you may be thinking, but what about the value of exploring ideas with peers per se – quite apart from the role of talk in either cementing learning or learning how to express oneself in academic idiom. What about a space for provisionally, for turning over ideas and opinions? For this, we need to explore oracy within the curriculum as reasoning, explanation and opinion giving are not generic abilities. They are shaped by the subject within which they are taking place.

Oracy as curriculum

That most schools in England now embrace the idea that having a coherent curriculum is a necessary if not sufficient component of a good education is a major achievement. However, there is more to understanding curriculum than appreciation that knowledge is important and should be sequenced in a way that reinforces and deepens prior learning while making connections to and preparing for new learning. An aspect of curricular understanding that is less well developed is that concerning how the different subjects are different and the implications those differences have for how and what we teach.

More often we hear concerns about ‘teaching subjects in silos’ without understanding that knowledge is structured differently in different subjects for good reasons which makes a degree of containment – or siloing if you will – not only inevitable but important.  Each discipline is a search for meaning, a particular truth quest.  As Ruth Ashby explains in her excellent book Curriculum: Theory, Culture and the Subject specialisms  ‘a discipline’s practitioners look out at the word in unique ways; they notice certain types of things, they ask certain types of question…’ If we try and blur the distinctiveness of the different disciplines, we lose specific ways of noticing and narrow the range of ways in which we can make meaning. As Ruth describes, we can describe these quests after meaning as fitting into four different categories; descriptive, interpretative, expressive and problem solving.

Some disciplines describe the world, seeking to ‘find facts and to make meaning from then; to distil, interpret, reduce or generalise.’ Science and maths in particular, and some aspects of geography, history and religious studies follow descriptive quests, using logic and empiricism in the service of truth seeking. Objectivity is assumed to be both possible and desirable.

Some subjects interpret the world. In interpretive quests, subjective interpretation is valued, truth being sought through reasoned argumentation. Much of history, theological aspects of religious studies, literacy criticism, art and some aspects of geography ‘all have explicit interpretive aspects to their quests, and do not seek objectivity or single-truth in the way that science and mathematics do.’

Yet other subject quests are expressive – for example the arts – and seek approval not just from the subject community but also from curators, critics and the interested public. This is very different from truth-seeking grounded in empirical testing as used by the sciences. Finally we have the problem seeking quest followed by design, computing engineering, food technology and so on.

It is important to notice that a single subject may straddle more than one ‘quest.’ History, for example, is both descriptive and interpretive. English is by turns descriptive (for example, in phonics), interpretive (for example when seeking to understand a text) and expressive (for example when writing or voicing a personal response to a poem).

In a broad and balanced curriculum, children learn to make meaning in all these different ways. Part of the curriculum in a subject in learning how meaning  is made, how knowledge is accepted, contested or refuted. Subjects with interpretive and expressive quests require space in which the ability of children to engage with and in interpretation and expression in a way that descriptive and problem-solving subjects do not. 

Even within interpretive subjects, while diversity of thought and subjective opinion is integral to the subject, that does not mean that all opinions are equally valid and that there are no wrong answers. Opinions are not just aired; they are justified with respect to evidence. One way in which oracy can go very, very wrong is in the wrong-headed belief that expressing opinions is good in itself, regardless of what knowledge may tell us and without the expectation of rigorous thinking. A notorious example of this occurred on Twitter, when a prominent headteacher championed children voicing doubts about the moon landings because he appeared to value having an opinion and challenging accepted narratives over having due regard for evidence. This is to promote a conspiracy theory curriculum which should have no place in any school.

The University of Pittsburgh promotes a practice called Accountable Talk. Children -and one would hope their headteachers – are accountable ‘to the learning community, to accurate and appropriate knowledge, and to rigorous thinking.’

They write about how talk is used in different subjects here.

‘Disciplines vary in the types of evidence they value. When students are digging into a good poem or story, for instance, they might be trying to sense how the words and rhythms create tension or convey emotions. No one expects a student to provide a “proof” for her claim that a verse evoked a particular emotional response. However, if a student provides an interpretation of the motivation behind a character’s actions, we expect that student to cite multiple pieces of textual evidence to support that interpretation. Within a social studies lesson, students may marshal historical facts to support a position that begins as an “opinion.” But if a student explaining his thinking about a fractions problem were to say, “I think the 4 stays the same because it just feels right that way,” he is not being accountable to the standards of evidence that apply in the discipline of mathematics. That it “feels right” might be recognized as an intuition and valued as such as a starting point. But it would be appropriate to ask the student to examine this intuition and push for a more mathematically relevant basis for it. There are thus different standards of evidence in different fields, and students need to be inducted into those different kinds of academic communities.’[7]

 Or as Shanahan and Shanahan put it

Disciplines differ extensively in their fundamental purposes, specialized genres, symbolic artifacts, traditions of communication, evaluation standards of quality and precision, and use of language.

With regard to language use, different purposes presuppose differences in how individuals in the disciplines structure their discourses, invent and appropriate vocabulary, and make grammatical choices.

Shanahan and Shanahan 2012[8]

Oracy and opinion

Devoting space to enabling the voicing and listening of each other’s opinions is sometimes seen as the pinnacle and main purpose of oracy. Robin Alexander talks about dialogic teaching that ‘extend[s] thinking through ‘collective, reciprocal, supportive, cumulative and purposeful classroom talk.’[9]  The whole purpose of this piece however is to argue there is not one purpose for oracy. Rather there are several different purposes – or several different oracies if you will – and being clear about why we are doing what when is crucial if things are to be done well, rather than in a fit of breathless, modish enthusiasm.

Insofar as talk promotes the integrity of the discipline, and genuinely extends thinking without exerting a disproportionate opportunity cost, then it is to be recommended. However, talk can sometimes be eagerly adopted without sufficient understanding of what promoting the integrity of the subject involves.

For example, the role of opinion in history is often misunderstood.  Within history, developing student’s ability to voice informed opinions about differing interpretations is an important curricular goal. The National Curriculum for history states that part of the purpose of study is to:

‘…equip pupils to ask perceptive questions, think critically, weigh evidence, sift arguments, and develop perspective and judgement.’

In this concept cartoon from Voice 21, the four fictitious characters voice different reasons, all drawn from historical sources, which contributed to Hitler becoming Chancellor. Crucially, children are not being asked ‘why do you think Hitler became Chancellor?’ They are being asked a question that might initially appear as only slightly different ‘which of these [historically evidenced] causes do you think were most influential in Hitler becoming Chancellor?  They are being asked to voice an opinion that is grounded in historical evidence, and how to weigh different pieces of evidence.

Compare this with the example below, also from Voice 21.  This asks the children for their opinion about whether or not it was right to evacuate children during World War 2. But this is not a historical question!  Here, children are not being asked to make historical judgements. Answers to historical questions must be grounded in historical evidence. Where opinions are discussed and weighed, these should be the differing opinions of those living through events as they happened. The sort of question which looks back at the past from the standpoint of the present and makes judgements about whether or not they did the right or wrong thing is what is called ‘presentism’ and is NOT history!  Whether or not Tamana thinks some cities were dangerous is irrelevant, unless Tamana is a citizen in 1939 whose views we have access to. Were this cartoon redrawn to reference differing opinions from people at the time, based on evidence, then it would become an appropriate tool for use in a history classroom.

If opinion giving is valued without understanding the role of knowledge in each subject in informing those opinions, and what kind of opinions are appropriate and inappropriate, then we are stepping into dangerous territory.

The arts, and some aspects of English, are subjects with an expressive quest. Here, the personal responses of others to a piece of work, as well as the ability to articulate an informed personal response oneself, is part of the curriculum. Here, we might say ‘there are no wrong answers’ (though clearly there can be naïve,  or ill-informed answers). We might say as a matter of principle, in this context learners have the right to make their own interpretation that may differ from their peers or their teacher.  Diversity of thought and  absence of consensus are acknowledged and may even be championed. This is quite different from the descriptive quest subjects where there are very definitely wrong answers. Within descriptive quest subjects, the viewpoint of the knower is irrelevant. Single truth is assumed to be possible and desirable. Similarly in interpretive subjects, there are wrong answers. The opinion that the moon landings did not happen is discernibly false, for example. Indeed, subjects with a strong interpretive quest are perhaps most at risk from misunderstanding about opinion, precisely because scholarly opinion does differ and debate between scholars is constitutive of the subject. But unlike the expressive quest, while this diversity of opinion is acknowledged, it isn’t championed in the same way it is within the expressive quest. Access to a single historical truth might be impossible, but historical opinions are bounded by evidence and are not infinitely flexible.

That said, the curricular rationale for exploratory talk in  subjects with interpretive and expressive quests is relatively straightforward, and will be focused on developing the ability to provide informed opinion. But this is not to say that exploratory talk does not have a role in descriptive subjects such as maths and the sciences. However, within descriptive subjects, giving one’s opinion is unlikely to be  a curricular object. In maths, justifying one’s reasoning with reference to logic or being able to give a proof is an important part of the maths curriculum to which oracy needs to contribute.  One of the aims of maths is described in the National Curriculum as developing the ability to

‘…reason mathematically by following a line of enquiry, conjecturing relationships and generalisations, and developing an argument, justification or proof using mathematical language.’

NCETM in their article Four ways to create better mathematical talk in your classroom propose that as well as checking for understanding teachers should create:

‘opportunities to talk about something other than ‘the answer’ can create a more discursive atmosphere and reduce inhibitions by removing the anxiety of being ‘wrong’. For example – classifying, comparing, focusing on method rather than solution. Questions such as ‘What do you notice?’ or ‘What do you think would happen if…?’ can be useful.’

 The curricular importance of this is that there is more to maths than finding answers. Being able to think mathematically and communicate that thinking to others is central to what it is to learn maths. This article by Mike Askew is an interesting account of how he does it as well as potential pitfalls.

 In science the National Curriculum has a section on spoken language which says

‘The quality and variety of language that pupils hear and speak are key factors in developing their scientific vocabulary and articulating scientific concepts clearly and precisely. They must be assisted in making their thinking clear, both to themselves and others, and teachers should ensure that pupils build secure foundations by using discussion to probe and remedy their misconceptions.’

If we unpick this using the lens of pedagogy and curriculum, we can see that a curricular object includes

• Articulating scientific concepts clearly and precisely

 This is clearly not about giving opinions.

Pedagogically teachers are to

• Ensure that pupils build secure foundations by using discussion to probe and remedy their misconceptions.’

 This is classic checking for understanding

And then, straddling both the pedagogical and the curricular

• Making thinking clear to themselves and others

Articulating scientific concepts clearly and precisely  involves both the pedagogical use of talk as a way of framing and extending initial thoughts and also learning the ways in which specifically scientific discourse uses particular structures. The Ofsted subject review for science said that

‘To learn about science, pupils need to learn about the different ways in which scientists engage in their work: through reading, talking, writing and representing science.This is called disciplinary literacy. It is not the same as teaching generic literacy strategies needed to interpret any text. Instead, it involves pupils learning how individuals within a discipline‘structure their discourses, invent appropriate vocabulary and make grammatical choices’.

This is where talk can be used in the science classroom as a prelude to writing scientifically, developing confidence with the vocabulary and grammar of the subject.

Juli Ryzop of the Knowledge Schools Trust has analysed the different grammatical patterns used in history, geography and science. I strongly recommend her training on this. [10]

Here is a slide from her training:

In order to write like a scientist, or historian and so on, we need to also be able to use disciplinary talk. While this may start out in exploratory mode, the goal is to recast it into formal scientific sentence idiom.

What we need to avoid is the imposition of forms of talk appropriate in one subject into another without regard for the structure and linguistic demands of that subject. We don’t want science teachers to be dragooned into watching English classes giving their opinions about a charged piece of writing and expected to do similar when students are learning about charged particles. We don’t want maths lessons where giving different methods of solving a problem is over-valued to the extent that giving a different method becomes an end in itself rather than a useful way of exploring mathematical thinking.

Curriculum and phase

As well as thinking about how the subject shapes oracy, we also need to consider how the age of the child influences choice of curricular objects.

In the Early Years Foundation Stage, communication and language is an area of learning in its own right. Because children are at the earlier stages of learning to communicate, oracy curricular objects predominate.  These include not only the cognitive and linguistic aspects of oracy, but also the physical and social and emotional.   For example, see this from Alex Bedford and Julie Sherrington’s [11]EYFS: Language of learning

These ways of communicating should then built on in key stage one as children receive a curriculum planned to enable them to develop the ability to

• talk to inform and listen to information
• talk to entertain and listen to entertainment
• talk to discuss and listen to discussion

and then in key stage two deepen all of these in progressively more challenging contexts as well as learning how to

• talk to persuade and listen (critically) to persuasion.  

I have written about this in a bit more depth and how they link to different subject areas  in the ResearchED Guide to Primary Literacy which is due to be published in October 2024.

In almost all primary schools, the same teacher teaches many subjects to the same children.  Because the use of accountable talk requires an investment of time before it is able to be used well, it may be easier to establish in a primary classroom where the same routines and have the same expectations can be applied across several subjects than in a secondary context where one might expect that implementation will be harder and opportunity costs potentially higher.

Some of the strategies from Voice 21, work well across all phases. Others are more appropriate to earlier stages of language development. Learning how to use ‘because’ when talking to give reasons is an appropriate curricular object in the Foundation Stage and year one and crafts readiness for the later use of conjunctions when writing narratives and when reasoning in subject specific ways. Playing a ‘because’ ice breaker in year nine is closing the gate several years after the horse has bolted.[12]

Oracy and assessment

Don’t get bogged down in how to assess oracy. Effective learning is not dependent on being able to quantify it with some sort of data label or being able to ‘provide evidence.’ As always, formative assessment that allows teachers to respond in real time in the classroom is by far and away the best use of assessment. This requires teachers to have a good mental model for what if means to get better at speaking and listening, informed by specific subjects. The mental model is provided by the subject curriculum, not an assessment rubric.

However, having some  way of summatively evaluating standards of talk is something that is being explored. For example, Voice 21 have written this on the subject.  No More Marking, the comparative judgement experts, have written this. What is interesting here is that progression is given via the complexity of what is talked about, rather than the fools errand of trying to describe progression in skills, which invariably ends in trying to make adverbs discriminate between performances, in an entirely subjective and ultimately meaningless way. Whereas if the curriculum is the progression model, increasing challenge involves the same skill being applied in progressively more challenging contexts. This is why ‘oracy’ curriculums where oracy is hived off from what is being talked about don’t really work for the linguistic and cognitive strands.  For example, see this example.  Year one are asked to offer reasons for opinions.  But it makes a lot of difference to the level of challenge whether you are being asked to give reasons for why you like a playing football or why you think economic reasons were the chief cause of the rise of Hitler. The complexity of the knowledge one is being asked to talk about is what provides the level of challenge. This probably matters less for the physical and social and emotional strands, though even here being asked to read with prosody a page from Dear Zoo is going to be easier than the prologue of Macbeth. Encouraging everyone to contribute is much easier on relatively uncontroversial topics and much more challenging when the subject matter is hotly contested.

In conclusion

1. Oracy should contribute to, rather than detract from or be seen as in competition with, knowledge building. If oracy in the classroom isn’t playing a role in building knowledge, then it is likely to be misplaced. [13]
2. Building knowledge does not preclude exploring knowledge. Exploring knowledge is sometimes a good strategy for building knowledge. And sometimes not.
3. Oracy includes checking for understanding. Closed questions have a valuable pedagogical role in this. Viewpoints that are dismissive of such exchanges as ‘not proper oracy’ should be viewed with scepticism
4. Be wary of approaches that either insist that children speak in full sentences all the time, or who conversely do not appreciate the need to be able to talk in full sentences when it is appropriate to do so. Don’t forget to read my blog about this!
5. Learning to communicate in sentence-based idiom requires thoughtful scaffolding  such as sentence starters and sentence builders. Just getting children to talk about stuff won’t be sufficient.
6. Approaches to oracy that reduce it to giving opinions are facile. This is even more the case when the opinions are not grounded in knowledge.
7. Be aware of how the knowledge architecture of subjects drives the kind of talk that is appropriate. Discussion and argumentation based on differing opinion  is integral to interpretive and expressive subjects. Within descriptive subjects the emphasis is on explaining reasoning.
8. Whole school oracy practices need to  take into consideration subject and age considerations rather than imposing generic expectations that run roughshod over these.
9. Beware assessment. Something is not more or less valuable if it is summatively assessed. There are lots of reasons to teach through or about oracy. Teaching oracy in order to generate evidence is not one of them. That way lies madness.
10. Voice 21 have some good resources and some not so good resources. Regardless Listen to other voices such as Doug Lemov and Adaptable Talk as well as Voice 21.

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[1] The transformative power of oracy – ORACY CAMBRIDGE

[2] See page 11 of Oracy-across-the-Welsh-curriculum-July-2018.pdf (oracycambridge.org) for a summary of key research findings.

[3] I say at which point in a lesson because sometimes things get misconstrued and what is intended to be a technique used for say 5 minutes within a lesson is understood as being the only technique used at all! As if actual teaching with clear explanation of content could be replaced by non-stop cold calling and talk partner routines!

[4] Alexander, Robin (2020) A Dialogic Teaching Companion. Routledge p15

[5] I’m looking at you ECF framework.

[6] From the University of PittsburghAccountable talk® sourcebook: for classroom conversation that works

[7] From the University of PittsburghAccountable talk® sourcebook: for classroom conversation that works page 6

[8] TLD200095_HR (shanahanonliteracy.com)

[9] Alexander, Robin (2012) Moral Panic, Miracle Cures and Educational Policy: what can we really learn from

international comparison?, Scottish Educational Review 44 (1), 4-21

[10] Juli can be contacted via @juliryzop.bsky.social  Her training is equally suitable for secondary and primary practitioners.

[11]  EYFS: Language of learning.

[12] Though clearly may be appropriate for children with moderate or severe learning difficulties or for children learning to communicate  in a language that is very new to them.

[13] I’ve talked of the role of oracy is building belonging. One can build belonging while building knowledge. these two are not in competition.

The older I get, the more I see how good ideas undergo distortion as schools seek to implement them. Collecting achievement data morphs into half termly data drops, an Ofsted focus on curriculum distorts into swirly whirly tube maps, intent statements and thinking this means learners – rather than staff – being able to explain curriculum progression, ‘fidelity to the programme’ in phonics mutates into people thinking they cannot deviate from any aspect of any programme at all (when it’s about not mixing and matching the sequence of phoneme:grapheme correspondences), dual coding gets reduced to putting icons on everything, retrieval practice limited to start of lesson quizzing, giving pupil feedback mutated into crazy triple marking rituals and so on and so on.  The concept of differentiation has undergone such far-reaching distortion and has spawned such unhelpful practices that it has been replaced by adaptive teaching . Entirely predictably, adaptive teaching itself is already beginning to experience lethal mutation.

Differentiation was originally intended as a process of planning teaching in order to meet a range of learning needs.  Sadly, the concept followed a well-worn path – what was once a good idea gave rise to counter-productive practices. These distortions of the original good idea set a ceiling on achievement for some learners[1] who were always given easier work whilst simultaneously massively increasing workload for teachers who had to plan multiple different activities. However, the original challenge of meeting a range of learning needs remains.

Enter adaptive teaching, the new solution to an old problem. Whereas traditional differentiation focused on individual learners or small groups of learners, adaptive teaching focuses on the whole class. Instead of providing different activities for different learners, adaptive teaching advocates teaching the same lesson to all, by providing scaffoldsto those who need additional initial support in order to access the same ambitious curriculum and meet the same high expectations. Crucially, additional support offered through scaffolding should be reduced over timeso that all learners can become increasingly independent.

‘Provide scaffolds’ is doing a lot of work here. If an adaptive teaching approach is to really help teachers meet the range of learning needs, it needs a lot more unpacking. How does it do this and what are the limits of this approach? We need to avoid the magical thinking that sees it as a way of teaching that can always and everywhere meet every need, no matter what. Adaptive teaching is not a miracle cure. There will always be a very small minority of learners whose learning needs are very, very different  and for whom all the scaffolding in the world won’t be enough. And there may also be one or two in a school every so often who find learning really easy and for whom extension activities alone are not going to be sufficient. As adaptive teaching becomes the new orthodoxy, we must be alert to moves to proclaim as heresy any suggestion that for a specific learner, adaptive teaching alone might not be the most appropriate response.

The big difference between adaptive teaching and differentiation is that with differentiation, it was expected that a large minority of your class were not able to access the same work as the majority, so needed something notably different.  Indeed, it was often expected to group your class into ability groups, each getting a different activity, something like this:

SEND group   Very easy activity

Lower group   Easier activity

Middles   Core activity

Top middles   Quite hard activity

Top group   Very hard activity

With an adaptive teaching approach, by contrast, being given different work becomes rare rather than routine. Adopting adaptive teaching as the main way of meeting a range of learning needs does not mean that no learner can ever be given a different task or learning objective from other learners. In a very small minority of classes, there may be an individual whose additional learning needs cannot be met through adaptive teaching alone. There is also a difference between what is achievable in cumulative subjects like history and hierarchical subjects like maths.

Adaptive teaching, properly understood, helps teachers address a range of learning needs without lowering expectations or generating massive workload.  It’s an ‘upstream’ approach, that reduces rather than abolishes the need for ‘downstream’ ‘additional and different interventions.[2]  Quality first teaching may have been a clunky phrase, but the word ‘first’ is quite right. First of all, let’s teach everyone as effectively as we possibly can. Then, and only then, if we are sure we’ve really done that, do we then look to what else might be necessary on top of quality teaching, for a small minority of learners. But unless we unpack what terms like adaptive teaching and scaffolding really involve, they will just become pious words uttered performatively and judgementally.

In what follows, I explore the role of adaptive teaching in supporting cognitive additional learning needs. Adaptive teaching also has a role in supporting other needs such as physical, communication and SEMH needs – but that’s not my focus in this piece.

Adaptive teaching: adapting memory demands

In an adaptive learning approach, learners have same learning objectives and do same tasks, but level of challenge can be increased or decreased according to need (including adaptions made in real time in the light of in the moment feedback gathered in lessons). To unpack what this actually involves,  I’ m going to start by using the work of  Adam Boxer on what it means for work to be more or less challenging. You can read about it here, and also in more detail in his brilliant book Teaching Secondary Science, a book that is well worth reading even if you don’t teach science or secondary.  Adam’s examples are – obviously – all drawn from science but here I am going to use the same approach to examine what are the factors underpinning whether something is more or less challenging. Adam outlines four factors that determine cognitive challenge, which, in a similar fashion to Adam’s work, we will explore one by one.

Factor one

For each example, which is the more challenging?

Example 1.

1. Why did the Fire of London spread so easily?

Or

• Give two reasons why the Fire of London spread so easily?

Example 2.

1. What are the typical features of a mammal and the typical features of a reptile?

Or

• What are the typical features of a mammal?

Example 3.

1. Learning to read a clock using the minute hand and the hour hand

Or

• Learning to read a clock using just the hour hand

Example 4.

1. Measuring the length of a curved road using paper on an Ordnance survey map

Or

• Measuring the length of a curved road using paper on a simplified map featuring only roads.

Answers:

Example 1.

1. is more challenging because it is more open ended so as well as thinking of the answers, you also have to think if there are any more answers.
2. is less challenging because it tells you how many answers to give so that is one less thing to think about

Example 2

1. is more challenging because it asks you to think about the typical features of both a mammal and a reptile
2. is obviously less challenging because it only asks you to think about the features of a mammal

Example 3:

1. is more challenging because you have to think about both the hour hand and the minute hand
2. is less challenging because you have to think about only the hour hand

Example 4:

1. is more challenging because the Ordnance Survey maps contain a lot of visual information, much of which requires screening out in order to concentrate on the road
2. is less challenging because the amount of visual information has been reduced, so it is easier to concentrate on measuring individual roads

The first factor that determines challenge is therefore:

The greater the number of things to think about, the more challenging the task

This was the factor that was usually changed in traditional differentiation. Some learners were asked to think about fewer things than others.

Factor two

For each example, which is the more challenging?

Example 1:

1. explaining why day and night happen

or

• explaining why the seasons happen

Example 2:

1. add together two [positive] numbers

or

• add together two negative numbers

Example 3:

1. give two reasons why the Fire of London spread so easily

or

• give two reasons why the Protestant Reformation spread so easily

Example 4:

1. Write three sentences which tell the reader about Lady Macbeth

or

• Write three sentences which tell the reader about Red Riding Hood

Answers:

Example 1:

1. is less challenging than b) because it is less complicated. You can model day and night fairly easily with a couple of balls and a torch. The reasons why we have seasons is much more complicated and difficult to model.

Example 2:

1. is less challenging than b) because positive numbers are more familiar and more easily represented through concrete resources than negative numbers

Example 3:

1. is less challenging than b) because the causes are  easily relatable to everyday experience (dry weather, flammable materials,  houses close together, no fire brigade) than the complicated and contested factors that led to the Protestant Reformation. Here factors are far removed from our experience.

Example 4:

• is less challenging than a) because the motives of Red Riding Hood (visiting a grandma, disobeying your parents) are more immediately relatable than the motives of Lady Macbeth (wanting power and control mediated through her relationship to her husband in a patriarchal society).

The second factor that determines challenge is therefore:

Some content is inherently more demanding than other content  (usually because its more abstract)

Factor three:

For each example, which is the more challenging?

Example 1:

1.  
2. 2+3=
3. 4+1=
4. 5+0=
5. 1+4=

Or

b)

• 2+3=
• 4+1=
• 5+0=
• 1+?=5

Example 2:

1. Why did the Fire of London spread so easily?

or

• Why did the Fire of London spread so easily?
• flammable
• close together
• fire brigade
• weather

Example 3:

1. What are the typical features of a mammal and the typical features of a reptile?

or

• What are the typical features of a mammal and the typical features of a reptile?

	mammal	reptile
skin
breathing
reproduction
heat

Example 4:

1. Write three sentences which tell the reader about Red Riding Hood
2. RRH wore…
3. Her grandmother needed food so …
4. Because of the dangerous wolf, …

or

• Write three sentences which tell the reader about Red Riding Hood
• RRH wore…
• She carried …
• Her mother warned her …

Answers

Example 1:

• is more challenging than a) because we’ve removed the predictable pattern

Example 2:

• is less challenging than a) because we have provided a word bank

Example 3:

• is less challenging than a) because we have provided a graphic organiser

Example 4:

1. is more challenging than b) because the writing frame involves complex sentences

The third factor that determines challenge is therefore:

Challenge can be altered by providing or removing external support for memory demands

Factor four:

Which is the more challenging?

1. What are the typical features of a mammal and the typical features of a reptile?
2. Learners asked to answer question immediately after teacher has explained the differences

or

• What are the typical features of a mammal and the typical features of a reptile?
• Learners are asked to answer this question 6 weeks after teacher has explained the differences

Answer: clearly a) is less challenging than b)

Which brings us to the fourth and final challenge factor

Challenge is determined by the things a learner knows

• If a child knows the information better, then the same question on the same stuff will be less challenging
• If a child does not know the information as well, then the same question on the same stuff will be more challenging

The four challenge variables are therefore:

1. Having to think about more things
2. The intrinsic demands of the content
3. How much external support for memory demands is provided
4. How much the learner knows

We can therefore use this to adapt what we teach, decreasing or increasing the challenge by:

1. Adapting the number of things learners have to think about
2. Planning a curriculum that reinforces and builds on previous knowledge: connecting new learning to previously learned content and preparing for and improving access to future learning
3. Providing support for memory demands
4. Ensure learners  know enough to access the lessons AND have a robust culture of retrieval so knowledge is remembered long term

We know that working memory is small and easily overwhelmed. When working memory is overloaded, information isn’t transferred to long term memory: learning fails to take root.  For learners with cognitive additional learning needs, working memory is likely to be even smaller. Some fortunate learners will have sufficient prior knowledge to compensate for teaching that underestimates the memory demands of the task in hand. They therefore have more resilience to such sub-optimal teaching. However, even cognitively privileged learners are likely to benefit from learning that has been planned with memory demands in mind. Such an approach is useful for all and vital for some.

This is the shift. Because some privilege learners succeed despite teaching approaches that are likely to overwhelm working memory, the all too human temptation is to see the problem with some learners not being successful as lying within those learners rather than the result of our teaching.  Ruth Ashbee’s excellent blog makes this point well.  She imagines a restaurant where there is an outbreak of E Coli.  Babies and the elderly end up hospitalised. How should the restaurant respond? By targeted sterilising of equipment for babies and extra long cooking for older customers?

‘What the restaurant needs to do of course is sort out the hygiene in its whole operation. It doesn’t need to change what it does for the key groups. It needs to change what it is doing at its core. Elderly people and babies aren’t getting ill because the restaurant isn’t catering properly for their unique needs. They’re getting ill because they are more susceptible to the problem to which everyone is being exposed: the E. coli.’

The same point is also made in this blog by Monica Nowers which features this useful graphic.

We can work to make our teaching less imperfect by

1. Reducing memory demands (and thus reducing the number of things learners have to think about at the same time)
2. Anticipating memory demands (by having a curriculum that is sequenced to reinforce, connect, prepare and deepen)
3. Support memory demands (by scaffolding that ‘holds’ some of the memory demands for the learner, allowing them to think with the same content as everybody else)
4. Strengthen memory (through a robust culture of retrieval so knowledge is remembered long term and by ensuring learners know enough to access lessons – which may involve interventions if fundamental building blocks of learning are not in place)

 

It is important to note that much of this is not just the responsibility of individual teachers and involves school wide systems and culture. Curriculum design that anticipates memory demands, having a clear teaching and learning policy, creating a robust culture of retrieval and running appropriate interventions are whole school decisions. Because adaptive teaching features in the DfE Teaching Standards, I can imagine a tick box, compliance focused performative approach to checking for adaptive teaching where the onus is all on individual teachers. Indeed, I have seen a lesson planning proforma which included a box for adaptive teaching! Yet, to use the familiar iceberg metaphor, observable teaching is one small element of adaptive teaching – there is a whole raft of whole school stuff below the surface, not least training teachers well so that they understand what adaptive teaching means in a way not shot through with lethal mutations.

Reducing memory demands

As mentioned above, this is the approach that underpinned much of traditional differentiation. Some learners were expected to think about fewer things than others.  A notorious example of this did the rounds on Twitter a while back when teachers were asked to share an example of the worst feedback they had ever received after a lesson observation. After a lesson on the five pillars of Islam, an RE teacher got the feedback that maybe they should have given the ‘lowers’ just one pillar rather than all five – thus managing to be offensive not only to the learner deemed ‘lower’ but also to Islam!

The place for reducing memory demands in an adaptive teaching approach is not on an individual basis but by thinking about the memory demands we are imposing on  all  learners, particularly during the explanatory – or “I do” – phase of the lesson.  All learners will learn better if we make sure we:

• explain  the learning rather than explaining activities
• break learning into small steps
• are explicit – don’t assume learners already know the prerequisite knowledge essential to understand what you are teaching.
• make sure visual information – for example on slides – is clear, legible and uncluttered
• be aware of the transient information effect. Spoken words disappear as soon as uttered – leaving no trace. Information on PowerPoints disappears when the next slide is clicked. We can reduce memory demands by having information written in more permanent form – on flipchart paper or in a booklet on the desk for example

So to return to the five pillars example, thinking about reducing memory demands would involve:

• having really clear, succinct explanations
• chunking explanations so the whole class learn about and then apply their learning one pillar at a time
• ensuring learner understand terms like pillar both literally and metaphorically
• using clear, legible, uncluttered visual information which adds to your spoken explanation without introducing extraneous visual noise
• giving learners more permanent access to this information via written materials

Reducing memory demands can further be considered during the ‘we do’ phase through checking for understanding and reteaching as necessary. Even with our explanation broken  down into small steps, clear visuals and mitigations for transience, there may well be some learners for whom this was still too much too soon. We need to be aware of who needs further explanation and practice. We need to repeat until everyone is enabled to be successful.  The “I do>we do> you” do sequence may more helpfully be thought of as the “I do> we do>we do>we do> we do> we do > we do> you do” sequence, because adaptive teaching involves adapting teaching in real time, flexing in the moment in the light of information we are gathering in the course of the lesson. Finally, in the “you do” phase of the lesson, we need to ensure we give everyone sufficient time for practice and avoid giving memory-intensive,  open-ended tasks too early. There is a time for problem solving, but that comes once the material necessary for solving problems is secure in long term memory. The amount of time allocated to practice should be thought about and planned for in advance, rather than a consequence of whatever time happens to be left in a particular lesson.[3]

There may be a very small minority of learners whose needs as such that they do  need to think about fewer things than their peers. For example, a child with a moderate learning difficulty might learn about the five pillars without encountering the Arabic terms for them and in narrative rather than explanatory form. Where learning needs lie beyond what adaptive teaching can achieve, differentiation by task is appropriate.

Anticipating memory demands

We can anticipate memory demands by having  a coherently sequenced curriculum that deliberately crafts readiness for more abstract content. The curriculum should reinforce and build on previous knowledge: connecting new learning to previously learned content, deepening understanding of concepts as they are revisited in different contexts.  As well as looking backwards, the curriculum should prepare for and improve access to future learning. Anticipating future memory demands is the ultimate adaptive teaching hack. Seemingly abstract concepts become less abstract through familiarity and when the prior curriculum deliberately and explicitly teaches learners enabling knowledge. The responsibility for this does not divide neatly into primary and secondary school blocks. Primary schools have a responsibility to craft readiness for the secondary curriculum and secondary schools have a responsibility  to  make connections with and build on the primary curriculum.

If we want learners to understand deposition and transportation of materials in rivers in key stage three, then they need to have learnt about erosion within  key stage two and before that, about rocks and soils. Hands on experiences in the Early Years playing with mud, sand and water prepare learners to understand in abstraction what they have encountered first hand.

If we want learners to understand the reproductive cycle of flowering plants in key stage three, then they need to have learnt about  – and this includes practical experience of – the germination of a range of plants in primary school. Not just once, by growing a bean, but experiencing and talking about the process of germination in seeds and bulbs. What changes over the course of the primary years is the expectations around use of technical language and ability to generalise across different plants.

If we want learners to be able to understand a variety of different musical scales in key stage three – major, minor, chromatic, blues and world music scales for example, then they need  to have learnt about and performed music of different pitch in key stage one, laying the ground for learning about pentatonic melody in lower key stage two before learning about octaves in upper key stage two.

You may of course quibble about what I am putting where – but the point is, if we want learners to build progressively more complex schema and to grasp abstract ideas with confidence, then we need to lay the appropriate  foundations through coherent, well sequenced curriculum design. Obviously creating such a curriculum is a whole school undertaking and not the responsibility of individual teachers.  The responsibility of individual teachers lies in knowing what comes before and after rather than just knowing the curriculum for the year groups they are teaching, so that they can build on or revisit  previous learning and also prepare for subsequent learning. Giving teachers time to do this would be very effective CPD.

Supporting memory demands

We can support memory demands through using scaffolding to  ‘hold’ some of the memory demands for the learner. The term ‘scaffolding’ is bandied about as the go to strategy for adaptive teaching, without really making it clear how it actually enables learners with cognitive challenges to access learning. The difference between reducing memory demands and supporting memory demands is that when we reduce memory demands, we deliberately plan to teach less initially, by breaking things up into small steps as a strategy to manage cognitive load. This can then lead to more being learnt eventually. When we support memory demands, everybody has the same opportunities to apply knowledge.  Scaffolding provides ways of supporting memory demands so that the learner doesn’t have to hold too much in mind all at once but can still think in sophisticated ways. There should always be a plan to reduce scaffolding over time. This may involve strengthening memory which we will visit in the next section.

Ten strategies to support memory

These strategies learn heavily on Andrew Percival’s 12 Teaching Tools.  During a learning sequence, several of these strategies may used, but always with the aim of independence with scaffolding being withdrawn as learners become more confident and successful.   

1. Matching

Matching supports learning because learners only have to think about the links between items – not remember the things themselves. This can be used with quite sophisticated material.  The first two examples are taken from Juli Ryzop of the Primary Knowledge Curriculum Trust.

Here the learner matches the main clause with the correct subordinate clause.  Neither clause needs to be held in memory (yet), so working memory is freed up to consider which main clause matches with which subordinate clause.

In this more challenging example, there are three items to be matched. Memory is supported both in  terms of factual information, and in how to construct a complex sentence.

This example borrows the sentence builder strategy familiar to MFL colleagues. The learner has choice about which sentences to match with the stem sentence and conjunction. The learner is supported to think about nine different aspects of the Fire of London and how to write a complex sentence. This scaffolding could be faded out over the course of a few lessons by gradually blanking out either the conjunction, or the second part of the sentence (or part of the second part).

• Sorting
• Learnerren only have to think about the properties – not remember the things themselves.

Sorting supports memory demands because learners only have to think about properties, and not the things themselves which are held in memory for them. This can be used to sort information into examples and non-examples, or to sort into categories or sequences by time.

In this example, memory is supported because learners do not have to count out quantities, possibly losing place or dropping equipment. These are given through a pictorial image which further supports memory by enabling  subitising rather than counting. All the learner needs to think about is deciding whether a representation is more, less or equal to five. Once this is done, of course a learner could make or draw their own examples.

 Here’s an example from the science curriculum:

Mammals	Not mammals

Tiger

Snail

Seagull

Cat

Elephant

Worm

Mouse

Goldfish

Human

Whale

Crab

Here memory is supported as the learner does not need to think about how many different sorts of animals they know  – which are likely to mainly be mammals anyway – but instead can think about whether or not each given example is or is not a mammal – focusing finite mental resources on categorisation not how many animals they know. Again, once this is done, some learners will be able to challenge themselves to add in further examples that they have come up with independently.

Sequencing events or processes are other examples of scaffolding via sorting.

• Graphic organisers

Graphic organisers support memory by holding the categories into which information is sorted for the learner so learners only need to think about where the information goes and not how to categorise it as well. In fact, graphic organisers are really just sorting done better – the tables in the two examples above are in fact graphic organisers themselves. Oliver Caviglioli in Organise Ideas explains how ideas can be categorised as being either ‘container’ or ‘path’. Container is where we sort ideas either by chunking into categories or by comparing them. Path is where we sequence ideas or think about causes, effects and consequences. Oliver has generously shared many resources such as the Dual Coding to Organise Ideas PowerPoint here – though I strongly recommend buying his book.

Particularly useful ‘comparison’ examples are the target map and the Venn diagram.

These target map examples are thanks to Karl McGrath Curriculum Task Design Lead at Benton Park Primary and all the teachers there who have provided examples.  See the Primary Task Design Facebook group for more ideas of how to use this model.

In this example, we can see how the target model has scaffolded the longer piece of writing.

And here we can see how it has been used in maths

Venn diagrams are used in this example to organise information into aspects that are the same and aspects that are different about dark and light speckled moths, having read this text.

Different levels of scaffolding can be provided with more or less text given up front.

• Word banks

Giving information in word banks prior to asking learners to write an explanation holds the memory demands of the information so that the learner can think about crafting sentences, spelling and handwriting.

What characteristics do mammals have?

• Fur or hair or blubber
• Breathes with lungs
• Gives birth to live young
• Makes own heat

In this next example, a graphic organiser – a simple table- is combined with a word bank for some more complex sorting.

• Sentence starters

Providing sentence starters holds the memory demands of both aspects of the story or information  and/or different sentence types.

Red Riding Hood wore…

She carried …

Her mother warned her …

Her grandmother needed food so…

Because of the dangerous wolf, …

Similarly as a scaffold to write about the water cycle:

Heat from the Sun causes water to …

Evaporation occurs when liquid water …

Warm water vapour rises up through …

As the water vapour rises higher and higher, the cool air of the atmosphere …

This process is called …

When a cloud becomes full of liquid water, it …

Rain and snow then fill …

The process then…

As part of gradually withdrawing scaffolding, in a subsequent lesson the activity could be repeated with lighter scaffolding, then finally withdrawn altogether.

Heat from the Sun…

Evaporation …

Warm water vapour …

As the water vapour rises …

When a cloud …

Rain and snow …

The process …

For writers at the very earliest stages of learning to use phonics in writing, a strategy called Russian scaffolding can be used. I have no idea why it is described as Russian!

• Fix the error

In fix the error, text or a calculation with (or possibly without) an error has to be thought about and errors identified and rectified. Here the learner’s working memory is focused on reasoning and sense making rather than generating or remembering content.

The Great Fire of London many days.

One reason was that houses was very flammable.

Another reason was that the weather hot dry.

The strong wind the flames from house to house

Or

6=2+3

5=3+4

6=2+4

Here’s a science example, revisiting a graphic organiser from earlier.

• Sentence jumbles

Like fix the error, jumbled up sentences ask the learner to deploy working memory to think about sense rather than generating content.

days of The London burnt many Great for Fire 

have Reptiles skin scaly snakes as such

• Complete the fragment

As in the two previous examples, the focus here is on sense making though with learners also having to transform the fragment into a sentence.

burnt  for many days

were very flammable

was hot and dry

The wind cause the flames to

• Sentence combining

Learners are given two sentences which they then try to combine by using appropriate conjunctions. Here memory is again focusing on sense making rather than generating content, which is held for the learner.

The Fire of London burnt for many days. Once fire breaks had been made it could not spread any further

The Fire of London burnt for many days. The weather had been hot and dry for a very long time.

The Fire of London burnt for many days. Many people lost their houses and became homeless.

1. Bringing it all together through chunking

Once learners have experienced success in learning content and making sense of it, they are then ready to bring what they have learned together in a longer piece. Here scaffolding holds the memory demands of how to organise a longer piece of writing so learners can think about what they now know and how they can craft clear sentences to communicate their knowledge.

For example, see this from @MRMICT (also from Benton Park Primary and admin for the Primary Task Design Facebook group  and the person who generously shared this and the above images with me).

Or this example from @MRA_RQT (apologies for cutting off the right hand side of the image).

Structure strips are another way of holding the memory demands of text organisation for the learner, freeing them up to think about content.

Strengthening memory demands

There are two aspects to strengthening memory, a general aspect of benefit to all learners and a specific aspect vital for learners who do have not yet acquired the pre-requisites upon which all subsequent learning depends, for example phonics, number bonds, handwriting, aspects of speaking and listening.[4]

The general aspect arises because forgetting is not, as we might imagine, an annoying hindrance to learning. Forgetting is, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, as Carl Hendrick explains brilliantly here, an integral part of the learning process.  We may have an episodic mental model of learning whereby lessons teach objectives that are then remembered (or not). However learning does not happen in this linear fashion, lesson by lesson, keeping pace with coverage. It’s much messier than that. Material is encountered, forgotten (which is really about it being lost rather than disappearing) refound  – or as we all call it, retrieved (from the French retrouver to refind). The reason why retrieval practice is important is because the very act of refinding the information forms new and possibly more useful associations between the thing remembered and relevant cues.

As Henrick puts it,  ‘You don’t learn something when you encounter it, you learn it when you forget it-remember it-forget it -remember-link it to something else you know and so on… Think of learning as something which happens over 6-12 months not in a single lesson.’

Strengthening learning therefore needs a strategic approach that plans for forgetting and builds in retrieval opportunities. This is useful for all but absolutely vital to learners with smaller working memories who can compensate for this by having a well-stocked and well organised long-term memory. Effective organisation of long-term memory is the result of both deliberate curriculum design that anticipates forgetting and future association and also through planned opportunities to refind – retrieve – previously forgotten content in contexts likely to forge helpful associations.  

The more specific aspect concerns the learning of key prerequisites such as phonics or number bonds to the point of automaticity. Once something is known to automaticity, it takes up very little room in working memory. This frees up the brain to engage in more complex forms of thinking.  Automaticity is a gateway to being able to think critically. It is therefore imperative that all learners – and in particular learners with smaller working memories – are given the practice time needed to acquire automaticity. For learners with smaller working memories, the acquisition of automaticity may take  longer and need more practice, often through what we call interventions. There is however a tension here – the more we take learners out of class for interventions (or outerventions as I’ve heard them called in parody) the more we deprive them of learning the same as their peers, potentially widening the gaps rather than reducing them – in effect reducing their curriculum. Such decisions are weighty ones, not to be made lightly and certainly not as a strategy of first resort.  Ideally this extra practice time is led by a teacher and while the rest of the class are also practising something – independent reading for example – rather than learning something new.

Traditional differentiation  – at least in its mutated form – tended to fatalism about the learning potential of a sizable proportion of each class. Some learners did not know enough to access the content that most of the class were learning so therefore needed easier – reduced – content. That was just how things were. An adaptive teaching approach on the other hand believes reducing the level of challenge should be rare rather than routine. Before we make the serious decision to limit what we teach a particular learner, we should be really sure that the other levers open to us – a curriculum that anticipates, teaching strategies that support and strengthen memory – are either being effectively deployed or cannot possibly overcome the barrier to learning that a specific learner faces. These kind of far-reaching decisions should not be left to individual teachers but at the very least should involve SENDCos and possibly other professionals too.

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[1] I’ve thought long and hard about whether to use the term learner, child, pupil or student. This blog is meant to apply regardless of phase. Learner is the most generic, so I’ve somewhat reluctantly chosen that.

[2] Peps McCrea explains upstream and downstream well here. (1) Peps on X: “The best teachers and leaders tend to think ‘upstream’. What do I mean by that? Here’s what you need to know: ↓” / X (twitter.com)

[3] From Ofsted maths subject report. ‘Pupil practice is sometimes limited in quality and quantity in both primary and secondary schools. This happens when leaders see practice as an activity, rather than focusing on its outcomes – whether pupils have practised until they have learned, to automaticity, the intended mathematical knowledge. There is often no consensus among leaders about benchmarks for optimal quality and quantity of practice that gives assurance that pupils have learned what is intended.

[4] As mentioned previously, in this blog I am only talking about the cognitive aspects of learning. Clearly there are also physical, communicative and personal, social and emotional aspects that may also strengthening or supporting and should be anticipated and at times, reduced. Handwriting for example, is dependent on physical strength and flexibility.

The purpose of schools is not chiefly or mainly to prepare children for exams or jobs. Rather, as Ruth Ashbee eloquently explains, it is to teach our children about meaning – about what it means to be human.[1] Through their curriculums, schools are custodians, curators and critics  of the magnificent legacy of human meaning-making. By engaging with humankind’s intellectual and cultural heritage, our children are enabled to join in with the great conversation about what things mean that has been taking place since the dawn of time.

This conversation discusses and disputes if there are reasons why things happen. Life isn’t a completely random and unpredictable series of chaotic events, it isn’t just one damn thing after another; there are, it appears, at least some patterns. Just exactly what is and isn’t a pattern is one of the main subjects of this conversation. Does the sun return after the winter because we have pleased the gods? Is that the pattern? Or is it caused by some other means?  Or is it completely random and unpredictable? Why do people do bad things? Can that be explained? What are the different answers that have been given to that question? Is it the stain of original sin, economic self-interest, demonic possession, psychological disposition, bad blood?

This conversation also expresses these patterns – or frustrating lack of pattern – in various symbolic forms. Sometimes visually, sometimes through story, music or dance. Humans want there to be patterns. We want there to be reason, meaning, coherence, sense. But sometimes things are, despite our deepest wishes, apparently random or meaningless.  One meta-pattern that weaves its way through the conversation is the idea of truth; the idea that our craving for patterns, for reasons, does not give us carte blanche to impose our desires about how we want reality to be, regardless. Pattern making by its very nature has rules that need sticking to, or it ceases to be a pattern. But different patterns have different rules and different vocabulary. So we need to learn how the rules differ depending on how we are looking at things, depending on the kinds of patterns we are looking for. Learning the rules and vocabulary and when they do and do not apply is an important part of learning to participate within the conversation. ‘Truth’ is shaped differently depending on which part of the conversation we are presently involved within. If we are looking for explanations about how flowers reproduce, we will use one type of pattern. If we are trying to make sense of our feelings by painting flowers – we will use others.

This is where different disciplines come in. Disciplines are different ways of making meaning. They are different because they seek to answer different types of questions and therefore do so in different ways. In various talks I’ve given using Neil Almond’s metaphor of the curriculum as boxset,  I’ve talked about renewable conflict. This is, as far as I have been able to find out, an idea from screenwriting. The idea is that if you want to write a successful long running series, you need to make sure it has a conflict at its heart that will never be ultimately resolved. So Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter series do not have a renewable conflict at their heart as eventually evil is defeated but Game of Thrones does because the conflict at its heart is about who should rule the realm and how to cope with the woes of nature. Characters can come and go, live and die – and frequently do – but this central conflict endures potentially forever. Now I appreciate that Game of Thrones did eventually come to an end and I am not enough of a fan to know whether potentially that same conflict could fuel a future series, spin off, prequel or whatever. But I think the idea of a renewable conflict is interesting applied to the idea of different disciplines.

For example – and I am not saying that my attempts at formulating the renewable conflicts at the heart of various subjects is in any way definitive – I suggest that these questions could be seen as renewable conflicts for different subjects. See if you can match which question goes with which subject?[2]

1. Natural phenomena vs evidenced explanation
2. The past vs evidenced explanation
3. Human desire to thrive vs physical processes
4. What is the meaning and purpose of life vs conflicting answers vs impossibility of knowing for sure
5. Physical competence vs sloth
6. Creation of meaning/beauty vs taste vs technical competence
7. Power vs people who want or need something
8. Creation of something useful vs technical competence

 

Because education is about meaning, this can lead some people to believe it needs to feel meaningful and fulfilling at every moment along the way. But learning to participate within the great conversation requires learning conventions, becoming familiar with narratives, honing skills and acquiring vocabulary that will all take effort. If we are to understand complex ideas in meaningful, joined up ways, there will be points where components will need to be learnt in isolation. This isolation is but a step on the way to later integration[3], but this step may be perceived as less purposeful or meaningful by the learner. At these points, teachers should frame the meaning for their students.

This framing can be done more or less well. Framing something as ‘this is meaningful because it will help you pass the exam’ may not be entirely false but sells a cheapened, instrumentalist view of education, where proof of knowledge is but a bargaining chip, shorn from its moorings within the discourse of meaning making.  What is more, it can lead to risibly impoverished practices where learning various short cuts and tricks to pass an exam is more important than letting the subject change you, develop you. If I just study GCSE assessment objectives via various extracts of literature rather than by reading lots of different books, I don’t experience the power of literature to change how I see the world. I might be able to describe the effect a text has on the reader but have not been afforded the opportunity for the text to have an effect on me. [4] If I only learn mathematical tricks and tips, I might never experience maths as a powerfully predictive identifier of patterns and relationships but as a series of arcane and meaningless school based rituals. If I can recall historical facts and causes for the periods on the syllabus but don’t know much beyond this, I may never understand how historical argument actually works. Nor will I understand the shades of meaning of such loaded terms as ‘empire’ or ‘democracy’ unless I have at least some familiarity with the diverse historical narratives within which these terms are central.

But none of this means that I should never be taught tips, short cuts or definitions and that every instance of my education must be deeply imbued with ‘Meaning.’  The justified horror of the short-cut, exam-driven education is exchanged for an equally mistaken desire to short cut straight to understanding the big ideas all at once, without slowly, slowly building the necessary foundations. This may at times require patient practice of skills and facts learnt for a time in isolation from the bigger picture within which they can then be put to work to do their transformative work of meaning making.

Teachers can frame the meaning for their students during these times in different ways. A simple disposition of encouragement is fundamental. The enthusiastic celebration of incremental successes is important. So is the acknowledgement of the sense of frustration and powerlessness when things are hard and the reassurance that given time and practice (and possibly better explanation on our part), the fog will clear and success will come.

It is a mistake to try to frame meaning by coming up with far-fetched and outlandish potential future ‘useful’ practical applications of what we are teaching in some desperate attempt to try and persuade our students it is meaningful. Ben Newmark describes the silliness of this well:

‘What often follows is teachers parroting learned consequentialist justifications. In my subject, history, this might be a teacher saying “if you understand that people in the past had different views, then you’ll understand that people today have too and this will mean you get on with people better when you get a job.”  But trying to justify the content of our curriculum by its capacity for practical application is flawed. Beyond basic literacy and numeracy most of what is learned in school is not obviously useful in the wider world without making absurd leaps. This is something many of the pupils I have taught have been acutely aware of. While it can be amusing to try and construct contrived situations that justify the teaching of something pupils regard as obscure, for example, “if you become a baker and your till breaks and you have to work out how much Mrs Jones owes you and you don’t have a calculator, or a phone, and there’s no way you’ll be able to get one then this algebra is going to come in really handy. If you remember it. Which given you only learned it to pass an exam, you almost certainly won’t.”

Worse, by indulging this argument we suggest the only subjects which are important are those with a clear and direct link to practical tasks pupils might do in the future. While some might argue this is actually quite right, curriculum developed on this principle would be radically different to most of those we deliver in schools today. In with using Excel and developing a good phone voice! Out with Homer, Angelou and the irrelevant Renaissance artists!

Do we really want our young people to learn only what is practically useful?’[5]

Meaningfulness is not the same as usefulness.

If education is to be meaningful it needs to result in something deep and durable that lasts beyond the moment. There is nothing wrong with fleeting pleasures or momentary joys but these are not what learning is. To learn something is to be changed in some way that that lasts beyond the immediate. If we encounter momentary joy or fleeting pleasure along the way, so much the better. But it is the lasting change that makes learning purposeful. Learning enables us to see the world in a new way. Whereas before we only saw trees, now we see elms, oaks and sycamores. Whereas before we only saw rocks, we now see granite, limestone and sandstone.  Whereas before we only saw shopping, we now see profit, loss and externalities.  Whereas once we saw ‘one bad apple’, now we see the historical roots of deeply institutionalised patterns of injustice.

As we learn to ‘see’ in new ways, our very selves are changed. Our minds are changed, physically. Some view this power that education has to change an individual with deep unease. The words ‘brainwashing’ and indoctrination’ are mentioned. [6] However deeply we feel this, surely leaving people ignorant is far, far worse. But Lessing’s warning remains. The classic purported antidote to ‘indoctrination’ is to let students exercise some choice over what they learn. But to do this is itself an ideological imposition. It is not a neutral stance.  Children cannot know much of what they don’t yet know so the idea of choice here is somewhat meaningless. An uneducated choice is not an informed choice.

Some knowledge is more powerful, more empowering than others. As Michael Young describes[7], there is a kind of powerful knowledge that enables people to predict, to explain, to envisage alternatives, to think in new ways. There is a strange irony in using our power as teachers to deliberately withhold this kind of powerful knowledge because we believe we know best what is good for children.

What is more, there is something rather sinister in the idea of the learner as consumer, endlessly exercising ‘choice’ over what they wish to engage with, rather than engaging with a tradition that seeks to educate rather than placate them.

As Gert Biesta writes

‘We go to school, not to get what we already know that we want, but because we want to receive an education. Here, we would expect teachers not just to give students what they know they want or say they want or are able to identify as what they want, but to move them beyond what they already know that they want. We want teachers to open up new vistas, new opportunities, and help children and young people to interrogate whether what they say they want or desire is actually what they should desire. To turn the student into a customer, and just  work on the assumption that education should do what the customer wants is therefore a distortion of what education is about, a distortion that significantly undermines the ability of teachers to be teachers and of schools, colleges and universities to be educational institutions rather than shops.[8]

Education is not always comfortable. Education can confront us with realities we would rather remain ignorant of. Education should provoke, jar, push up against what we want to be true. It is easy enough to think of possible scenarios: the child who has been brought up to think that their country is superior and a bastion of justice and fair play encountering for the first time the evidence of its complicity in slavery and colonialism, the child who believes that their religion believes x or y to be terrible sins, only to learn in school that others within the same religion believe both x and y to be perfectly acceptable, the child who has been led to believe that their freedom of expression is the ultimate good, the child who has only ever viewed the world through the lens of their Guardian reading parents.

For Biesta, the power of education lies in introducing children to things that offer resistance to their desires, ideas and assumptions. Education is the process through which children work through that  which resists them and come to terms with it.

‘From the perspective of the student teaching thus brings something that is strange, something that is not a projection of the student’s own mind, but something that is radically and fundamentally other. The encounter with something that is other and strange—that is not of one’s own making—is an encounter with something that offers resistance.’[9]

If education is an induction into meaning making, then it is right and proper that questions of ‘whose meaning’ are held up to scrutiny and argued over. Schools may be custodians and curators of what they see as the best, the most powerful articulations of meaning from within humanity’s great conversation, but they also need to be both self-critical and open to critique. The curriculum must include the necessary tools to enable this. We need to borrow the idea from the Protestant theology of semper reformandum – always in need of reform.  Any curriculum can only ever share the tiniest fragment of the wealth of human thought so questions about why X has been chosen rather than Y or Z need to be reflected upon and held up for scrutiny. This includes inducting students themselves into the conflicts and assumptions within subjects and drawing their attention to the fact that the curriculum itself is but a partial selection that could have been otherwise. In curating a curriculum, we need to be sure to include those aspects that that give students some power over their own knowledge.[10] We need to draw attention to the parameters of truth telling within each discipline. Without these, students are powerless in knowing if these parameters have been breached. In other words, part of what we curate must include disciplinary knowledge as well as substantive knowledge.

Disciplinary knowledge is knowledge about how knowledge ‘earns its stripes’ and gets to be regarded as knowledge. It is about the rules within a subject that enable truth claims to be upheld, challenged, contested, refuted, superseded or rendered obsolete. Each discipline has its own rules of engagement which govern the kind of questions it is and isn’t possible to ask within a given subject. We need to teach children what those rules are so that children, over time, can join in the conversation about the significance of the content we are teaching them. As Christine Counsell explains:

Disciplinary knowledge… is a curricular term for what pupils learn about how that knowledge was established, its degree of certainty and how it continues to be revised by scholars, artists or professional practice. It is that part of the subject where pupils understand each discipline as a tradition of enquiry with its own distinctive pursuit of truth. For each subject is just that: a product and an account of an ongoing truth quest, whether through empirical testing in science, argumentation in philosophy/history, logic in mathematics or beauty in the arts. It describes that part of the curriculum where pupils learn about the conditions under which valid claims can be made, and associated conventions such as what constitutes evidence or argument in that subject.[11]

If we want children to appreciate that there are such things as truth claims rather than just a myriad of conflicting opinions, if we want them to see truth-seeking as an ethical endeavour that lies at the heart of human meaning-making, then we need to share with them how ‘truth’ works. This is particularly important when children encounter ideas in school that offer resistance to cherished assumptions.  As Michael Fordham outlines here (in the context of teaching issues such as racism and colonialism):

‘When we teach pupils things that can be uncomfortable for them to hear, it is normal in the classroom to get some pushback. Sometimes this even comes from parents. Questions such as “how do you know?” or “isn’t this just your opinion?” might…justifiably be asked; more worrying still are those who think this but do not say it. When it comes down to it, what are our answers to these questions? To my mind, these answers must be based on truth, evidence and reason.’[12]

Different subjects have different ways of looking, of explaining which is why trying to teach generic skills of ‘observation’ or ‘explanation’ are misplaced. How we look in art is very different from how we look in science. Explanations in history are different from explanations in maths which are again different from those in geography or music. We need to be able to look at the world in all these different ways and know what we are doing, what assumptions we are making, when we do so.

If we want to nurture critical thinkers who have the requisite powerful knowledge, then we have to respect these subject boundaries, even when it is inconvenient. If we want to induct children into the various truth quests that each subject embodies, then we need to resist the temptation to marshal truth claims in one discipline to bolster cherished beliefs in another. Totalitarian regimes are infamous for violating this essential pre-condition for truth telling, for example, warping science to fit with religious convictions or history to fit with political ones.

While it is easy to cast aspersions on the ‘false news’ of Totalitarians, it is harder to keep away from doing so ourselves when it involves matters we care passionately about. For example, plastic pollution is an obvious scourge of our time and learning about how and why plastic ends up in our oceans and on our beaches, why this is problematic and how communities have responded are all appropriate subject matter for a geography curriculum. Campaigning against plastic pollution is appropriate subject matter for citizenship.  But not for geography. History, geography, science, are disciplines for establishing truth; disciplines don’t prescribe the ‘ought’, i.e. what we do about them, only the ethical ‘ought’ of truth-seeking itself.  PSHE, assemblies, citizenship, and school councils are places where schools engage with the products of those disciplines and build moral sensibility for individual and collective action.[13]

As I write, a statue of the 18^th century slaver trader Edward Colston has just been toppled by protestors in Bristol. It is entirely appropriate within the context of history lessons to seek to answer enquiry questions such as ‘What was the legacy of the slave trade on the city of Bristol?’  Discussing arguments for and against direct action against contested monuments is completely appropriate within a citizenship lesson, but not within a history lesson. (Should the question be asked during a history lesson, the teacher might think it really important to engage with this question in the moment but should clearly signal that history as a discipline does not have the right tools for engaging with moral questions and that they are taking off the ‘glasses’ of historical discourse and donning the glasses of moral philosophy in order to discuss the issue.) What is important to note here is that in order to debate the moral issue in an informed way, the requisite historical knowledge is necessary. A decolonised curriculum is of necessity a knowledge-led curriculum (though a knowledge-led curriculum is not necessarily a decolonised curriculum). Any UK secondary school history curriculum that does not include detailed enquiry into both empire and slavery is an airbrushed curriculum. The establishment of truth in history depends on scrupulous efforts of avoiding ‘presentism’, the ahistorical and anachronistic judging of the past by contemporary standards. There are plenty of 18^th century figures who stand in judgment over the pernicious and morally repugnant practice of slavery. These are the voices that should be heard in history lessons.

If the purpose of schools is to teach children about how to speak truthfully what it means to be human, then the conversation must encompass the breadth of humanity, especially those voices it is more convenient to ignore or suppress. It must tell the truth about shameful failings, obfuscations, denials, vested interests and inconvenient facts. And do so in ways that respect each tradition of enquiry and the distinctive way in which it pursues the truth.

 

[1] Ashby Ruth (2020) Why it’s important to understand school subjects – and how to begin to do so in Sealy Clare (ed.) the ResearchED Guide to the Curriculum.  Woodbridge: John Catt. . p41

[2] science, history, geography, RE, PE, the arts, politics, technology.

[3] Christine Counsell’s highlights the tension between isolation and integration in her chapter Better conversations with subject leaders in Sealy Clare (ed.) the ResearchED Guide to the Curriculum.  Woodbridge: John Catt.  p104

‘All curricular thinking amounts to either isolation or integration of components. Observing any moment of teaching, this is what we see – the (temporary, artificial isolation and/or integration which makes components functional in a larger set of journeys.’

[4] I have paraphrased and stolen this sentence from Christine Counsell’s chapter p108

 

[5] https://bennewmark.wordpress.com/2019/02/10/why-teach/

[6] http://www.notable-quotes.com/l/lessing_doris.html

[7]  Young M and Lambert D (eds) Knowledge and the Future School. London: Bloomsbury

[8] Gert Bietsa. European Journal of Education, Vol. 50, No. 1, 2015

[9]   Gert Biesta in Phenomenology & Practice, Volume 6 (2012), No. 2, pp. 35-49. Giving Teaching Back to Education: Responding to the Disappearance of the Teacher  file:///C:/Users/pc/Downloads/19860-Article%20Text-48221-1-10-20130620.pdf

[10] David Lambert ttps://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10042097/1/Lambert_Who_thinks_what_geography.pdf

 

[11] https://impact.chartered.college/article/taking-curriculum-seriously/

[12] https://twitter.com/mfordhamhistory/status/1269726577534918656

[13] I am indebted to Christine Counsell for these last two sentences which she shared with me in a Twitter exchange as I sought to understand the role of disciplinary knowledge.

Something that has always bemused me is the opposition that arises whenever it is suggested that what children learn in the foundation stage should prepare them to be ready for year one. The standard response to this is that the foundation stage is important in its own right and does not exist as a warm up for what comes later. It is there, so it is said, to lay the foundations for future successful learning in terms of child development rather than any specific content.

The passionate advocacy of the foundational role of the prime areas of communication and language, personal, social and emotional development and physical development for all future learning is something I would also champion. Abundant research finds that a strong foundation in the prime areas by the time a child is five is essential if a child is to thrive academically. Without these essentials in place, further learning will be drastically impeded. So any curriculum development that undermines the building of these firm foundations is foolhardy at best. Rushing to build the superstructure before the foundations are secure is a doomed enterprise: foundations being, er, foundational.

However, it is perfectly possible to assert this, and assert it vigorously, while at the same time thinking about the kinds of specific content which might provide a context within which the prime areas can be developed, content that might also be foundational for later more specific learning. It is a false dichotomy to think that it is a case of either promoting the prime areas or having a curriculum that includes specific knowledge and skills that will be built upon in the rest of schooling. Considering the latter does not necessarily undermine the former. It could, of course, done badly. Generally I’m against doing things badly.

For example, there are many concepts in geography where future understanding will be greatly strengthened if this can be built on prior experiences gained in the Early Years. For example, a child who has played with mud, sand and water in the mud kitchen will more readily understand concepts such as erosion and permeability than a child who has not has these first hand experiences. The concept of trade begins with role playing in a shop. Map work needs solid understanding of spatial relationships, and whether or not the revised Early Learning Goals for maths include shape, space and measure, the Early Years curriculum needs to include them as they are foundational for later geographical understanding. (They are foundational for later mathematical understanding too and should form part of any Reception curriculum, whether or not there is a corresponding Early Learning Goal.) Population and the complex idea of population density begins with a firm understanding of conservation of number. Understanding the concept of atmosphere needs foregrounding in experience of power of the wind, of talking about the weather, the sky, looking at clouds. Experiencing lots of different kinds of plants, flowers, trees, mosses, ferns, cacti, seaweed, pondweed, fruits and grains builds firm foundations for understanding the diversity of vegetation. Understanding the crucial role that water plays in our world is supported by experience of water tray play, freezing, evaporation, exploring puddles, rain collection as well as trips to whatever is local, be that a pond, a river or the sea.

Seeing a mountain might be an everyday occurrence for some settings and a logistical impossibility for others, but we can all read stories with a mountain setting and look at pictures and videos of mountains, deserts, marshes, rivers, jungles, the North Pole, the South Pole. We can all look at globes and maps and begin to learn about climate, learning that the poles are very cold and the equator very hot, and they we live in between the two. Don’t underestimate the role of small world either. It may or may not be easy to visit a farm, but everyone can experience small world farm animals, or play with tractors, or the Arctic or a jungle.

Apparently during a recent Ofsted inspection of a nursery, the inspector asked how the setting was preparing the children to be future geographers. Now I fully understand how different this line of questioning is and how at first glance one might be tempted to answer (at least in one’s head) with a rather rude response, as of course the prime areas are everybody’s first (or prime) concern and we are used to thinking about our provision in those terms. However, now that the question has been posed, why shouldn’t we also think about how the environment we provide, the things we talk about, the trips we go on and the books we read can play a part in building firm foundations for understanding the world? Why shouldn’t we think about what foundational geography might consist in? So I would suggest should any Early Years professional or geography leader be asked about how Nursery provision ‘prepares children to be future geographers’ they direct the questioner to the sand and water trays, the mud kitchen and the building blocks.

Physical geography and science are rather easier to think about in this way as they involve concrete things you can touch. (And hats off to the Reception class I visited last week which had a tuff tray full of root vegetables including what I though was an enormous, leafy, soil-encrusted carrot which I then learned was actually a sugar beet!) Foundational RE can use artefacts. Visitors and visits are easier for some locations than others. Stories of course are crucial here, and again small world play can reinforce what has been talked about or experienced first-hand.

History is necessarily more abstract in that the past is, by definition, not here right now. The familiar activities of thinking about one’s own development from babyhood (done sensitively of course with regard for those children whose early life is not typical) are central, but we don’t have to stop there. Just as with geography, there are historical concepts we can begin to lay the foundations of understanding for. Encountering kings, queens, princes and princesses in stories and in role play lays the foundation for understanding what monarchy means. Castles, knights, armour and shields may or may not be easy to see on a school visit, but we can all tell stories featuring these and provide role play opportunities to give children opportunities to use the new vocabulary they have learnt. Concepts such as democracy and government begin with personal, social and emotional development. Can we always get our own way? Why do we need rules? What do we do when two people want different things? Or the same thing but there is only one of them? Voting for things, talking about fairness, respect and tolerance are all essential pre-requisites for later historical understanding (as well as being important in their own right, of course).

Stories play a vital role in making the abstract past immediate. If we want young children to understand the world, we need to tell them stories that take them beyond the familiar, whether in time or in space, so that their world expands beyond what is immediate. So stories about notable people and events from the past need to feature in our Foundation Stage curriculum. Where there are places locally we can visit, then visit them, but not everybody is in a place to do this easily. Everybody can invite in an older person to talk about what it was like in the past (you know, the olden days, the 60’s). We can all easily share art works of people and places from the past.

None of this necessarily involves a particular pedagogy. I’m no advocate of a wholesale ‘in the moment’ planning way of doing things, but I can’t see why a well-resourced environment with knowledgeable adults couldn’t do ‘in the moment’ and simultaneously think along these lines. Yes, the prime areas are prime, but they can be expressed within contexts that expand our children’s worlds. I don’t know and have never visited @Oakwood Foundation, (nor know the extent to which they use in the moment planning), but I’d suggest having a look at their inspirational Twitter feed to see children who are being exposed to the wonder and variety of the world. Recent photos include children looking at photographs of various buildings from a ‘Beautiful Yorkshire’ book then using blocks to build a variety of impressive buildings (science, history and geography right there), some beautiful spider pictures after a child was curious about spiders (the setting has a collection of spiders in plastic blocks) and I will always remember being blown away by the fantastic art work the children did based on blood – red cells and capillaries galore.

The role of adults here is of course central, not just in planning the environment but in their own knowledge and understanding of the world.[1] If you want to extend children’s understanding about spiders, then you will have to know at least something about spiders. During an inset day looking at our Foundation Stage curriculum at my previous school, we spent time expanding our knowledge of wolves (since we were about to do some work based on fairy stories featuring wolves). This was not because we were going to have specific lessons on wolves, but so that we could extend children’s learning because we knew lots about them. Otherwise it was easy to limit our interactions to saying wolves were fierce. As a result, we found out, among other things, that wolves only live in the northern hemisphere. How easy it would be to show children a globe and explain that wolves only live in the top half ‘which we call the northern hemisphere’ but not the bottom half, ’which we call the southern hemisphere.’ Then another time that penguins live here ‘the South Pole, in the southern hemisphere’, and polar bears in North Pole, in the northern hemisphere.’ We made sure we knew the name of where wolves live, what their babies were called, how many babies they usually had, what different colours of wolves here are. We thought about the technical language used to describe wolves, that they have fangs and snouts and paws, that they were hunters, carnivores, predators. As a result, our own ability to talk about wolves was richer and more fluent. Then we did the same for other topics. Of course you can’t be an expert in everything a four year old might want to talk about, but you can do what you can, and that isn’t a reason for not doing it at all.

Since children build upon what they already know, it we want children later in their school careers and beyond to be able to think critically about population density, fair trade, sustainability and so forth, we need to ensure they already know the essential pre-requisites without which they will not be able to understand these more complex concepts. Some of this knowing will be the embodied knowing that comes from playing with sand or water. Some of it will be through listening to stories. Some of it will be through visits or listening to visitors. Some of it will because our teachers tell us about it. Lots of it will be reinforced through role play or art or music.

Curriculum development therefore should not start in year one, with the foundation stage cut off and isolated, detached from the rest of the school. We don’t call it the detached stage after all. Yes it has a unique focus in providing those essential foundations of child development upon which later learning will be build, and this should always be at the forefront of our minds. But that does not preclude also thinking about how our provision, our curriculum, prepares (lays a foundation) for what comes later in other ways as well. The two need not be in opposition. When a builder builds foundations, the kind of foundations are determined by what comes later. Light buildings have shallower foundations than tall or heavy ones. You don’t use raft foundations for skyscrapers or pile foundations of a one storey house. The foundation exists and is shaped by what comes next.

 

 

 

 

[1] Yes of course they also need to know about child development. Of course. That’s fundamental.

Part 4 in our series of blogs to help primary school teachers plan a coherent curriculum. As with the previous blogs, it is written with the assumption you are using the English National Curriculum, though it is still really useful if you don’t.

Credit as always goes to the author of these pieces Victoria Morris @MrsSTeaches . Details for how to get Victoria to help your school with curriculum development are available in part 1.

Part 1, on geography KS1 is here.

Part 2, on geography KS2 is here.

Part 3, on history KS1 is here.

Key Stage 2 History

In contrast to KS1, the majority of the areas of study for KS2 are stated explicitly. However, there are some choices that will need to be made before you can decide on the specific content you will teach in each unit, and place them in a logical sequence.

• Select an ancient civilisation for in depth study (one of Ancient Sumer, the Indus Valley, Ancient Egypt or the Shang Dynasty of Ancient China)
• Select a contrasting non-European society (one of Early Islamic Civilisation c.AD900, Mayan civilisation c. AD 900, Benin West Africa AD 900 – 1300)
• Select an aspect of local history (depth study or study of change over time)
• Select an aspect or theme in British history that extends beyond 1066 (depth study or study of change over time)

If your school is an academy or free school, you have slightly more flexibility, so you could select two examples from one of the lists, omit an objective, select two aspects that are later than 1066, or change the focus of some of the units. If you choose to do this, make sure that you can justify why this is best for your children’s learning.

The following are the factors I would suggest you take into account when making these choices of unit:

World history

• Your pupils’ backgrounds. This could be either to reflect their countries of origin, for example by selecting Early Islamic Civilisation in a school with a significant proportion of Muslim pupils, or to promote diversity by selecting a contrasting culture.
• The range of continents and countries represented when you consider the units you have selected as a whole – ensure you provide your children with knowledge of the most diverse range of cultures possible (considered in conjunction with choices in KS1 & in geography too)
• Links to the geography curriculum. For example, Ancient Egypt would provide opportunities to apply knowledge of rivers and deserts if these had already been studied in geography.
• The opportunities each study would afford for developing understanding of key concepts. Clare has developed a list of these (for history: civilisation, culture, empire, invasion, monarchy, tyranny, rebellion, oppression, democracy, society, community, taxation, source, evidence, chronology. Some of the geography concepts are also relevant to the study of ancient civilisations: trade, settlement and resources). (Developed from the list originally mentioned in this blog https://primarytimery.com/2017/10/28/the-3d-curriculum-that-promotes-remembering/)

British history

• Are any of the useful examples provided in the National Curriculum particularly relevant in your locality?
• What are the most significant aspects of history in your locality? (places, people, events or changes over time)
• Are any of the British pre-1066 areas of study particularly significant in your locality? If so, you may decide either that this justifies an additional depth study, or that you will select a contrasting period from post-1066 for the local study.
• Links to the science curriculum. Did any scientists live in proximity to your school? Were any scientific discoveries made nearby? If so, a study of their life and achievements could be enriching, particularly when combined with a trip to their house or a museum.
• Are there any major gaps in the units of study you have already selected? The aspect of British history extending beyond 1066 is an opportunity to rectify this.
• Links to UK geography. What region of the UK have you selected for the depth study and is there a significant aspect of British history linked to this region?
• Themes that will help children to better understand how daily life has changed over time, and that are relevant to their own lives – houses and homes, school, transport, communication, toys, technology, jobs. Are any of these under-represented in your curriculum?

The introduction to the KS2 National Curriculum for history provides a useful description of what the curriculum should look like as whole, so it’s definitely worth reading closely (even though it’s tempting to go straight to the bullet points to see exactly what you need to teach). This states that teachers should combine overview and depth studies, so it’s important to ensure that you have included both across the key stage. While the examples provided in the National Curriculum are non-statutory, it’s worth considering whether any of these would be suitable for your setting, if only because there are likely to be more resources available for these units.

In order to select a clear focus for each unit, as there are limits on the time available, you could consider the following:

• Use both the list of key concepts and themes referred to above – which ones were significant in the period of time being studied?
• Fully exploit local places of interest
• Look for opportunities to build on knowledge from previous units. For example, if you taught children about farming in Anglo-Saxon Britain, include farming, crops and food in your teaching of Ancient Greek life for comparison.
• Check the wording of each objective carefully:

Unit	Focus specified in NC
Stone Age to Iron Age	Changes in Britain (so must involve an overview of the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age in order to compare)
Romans	Roman Empire AND its impact on Britain
Anglo-Saxons	Settlement in Britain Separate from the next objective
Anglo-Saxon and Viking struggle for England	Invasion Spans the period from approx. 790AD to 1066
Ancient Civilisations	An overview of where and when the first civilisations appeared AND a depth study
Ancient Greece	Greek life AND achievements AND influence on the western world

 

Sequencing

There are two different ways you could choose to sequence the units you have selected:

1. Chronological sequencing starting with the earliest period of time in Year 3.

Advantages – could help children develop a good understanding of chronology, which is one of the aims specified in the National Curriculum.

Disadvantages – the youngest children study the periods that are furthest in the past, with the least concrete evidence available, making them the most difficult to imagine.

• where there are links with geography and science, sticking rigidly to chronological sequencing in history can result in less than ideal sequencing in other subjects, or useful links being lost (since science units are year group specific).

2. Place units of study in particular year groups based on cross-curricular links and the complexity of concepts taught within them.

Advantages – maximising opportunities for building on prior knowledge and integrating new knowledge into larger concepts.

Disadvantages – more difficult to develop secure chronological understanding, so the ways in which you will do this will need to be planned for. For example, you could create a school timeline including all the periods of time that are studied, start units by identifying how they relate to previous ones, and provide opportunities for children to practise ordering key people and events from all the periods they have studied so far.

Earliest suggested year group units should be included in, so that knowledge is built cumulatively (this is not essential, just how I would ideally do it):

Year group	When unit could first be included:
Year 4	Achievements of ancient civilisations (after the water cycle and rivers as all of these civilisations were built around rivers) Romans (before volcanoes so that children better understand example of Pompeii; after overview of ancient civilisations)
Year 5	Ancient Greece (after science on forces, earth and space; complex concepts more suited to UKS2; builds on Romans even though it was earlier)
Year 6	Stone Age to Iron Age (alongside or after evolution and inheritance in science so that children have a good grasp on the lengths of time involved when studying prehistory; after the Romans as Roman invasion was end of prehistory)

 

Additional things to take into account when sequencing:

• If possible, it would be useful for the units on the Anglo Saxons and the Vikings to come after the Romans so that these three are in chronological order. This way, children would be following the story of Britain before 1066 from beginning to end. However, these units could be placed before the Romans if necessary.
• Depending on your choice of local study and post-1066 British history units, these may be best placed in Year 3, where they can build on knowledge of the more recent past that children began to develop in KS1.
• If you selected early Islamic civilisation, it will be important to sequence this after children have learnt the basics of Islam in RE, and in particular about the life of Mohammed.
• Links to geography. For example, trade, settlements and natural resources are key geographical concepts that are particularly relevant to the study of ancient civilisations. Will you sequence these units before or after children learn about these aspects of human and physical geography?

Unit Checklist

Does the unit include:

• A geography lesson to orientate children to the place before learning about its history?
• Opportunities for children to identify connections, contrasts and trends over time? For example, recognising that historically people have settled near water.
• Historical enquiry questions? For example, ‘Why was the second Roman invasion of Britain more successful than the first?’
• Opportunities for children to revisit and build on prior learning? For example, if studying the Stone Age to Iron Age after the Romans, children should revisit what they know about the Roman invasion of Britain when they learn that this event marked the end of prehistoric Britain.
• Opportunities for children to develop secure chronological understanding? For example, regularly ordering people or events from all the periods of time they have studied so far.
• Links to other subjects, particularly geography, science and RE, where these links enhance children’s learning. For example, children could learn about ancient Greek discoveries relating to the earth and space, such as Aristotle proposing that the Earth was a sphere and the proposal of the heliocentric model of the universe, if they have already covered this in science when learning about ancient Greece.

 

 

This is the third in this series of blogs helping you plan your primary curriculum from Victoria Morris @MrsSTeaches. This one is about ks1 history. You can catch up with the previous two on ks1 and ks2 geography here and here.

I think Victoria’s work here really exemplifies what the phrase ‘the curriculum is the progression model’ means. Curriculum planning is a long game; we lay foundations which others build on. For example, Victoria suggests  if you read Room 13 in key stage 2, you might want to do some light touch work on the dissolution of the monasteries because this will lay the foundation for understanding the history of Whitby Abbey, as well as being valuable in its own right. It would certainly help children no end in when studying secondary school history if they already understood what terms like monk and monastery mean, and have some idea that there was this big argument between the church and the king way back when.

I remember studying the Lady of Shallot with a very capable group of year 6’s, but being slowed down by having to explain terms such as knight which we could have made sure was introduced via small world play in the Early Years then built upon in ks1. I also had to explain about barley and why is was bearded, but that’s a point for addressing via the science curriculum. People who have heard me talk about the curriculum will have heard my anecdote about asking  rural eduTwitter for wheat to show year 1 in October (assuming that harvest took place when we have harvest festivals) and being educated that I was a couple of months too late. Then some kind soul somehow finding some and sending a large box of assorted cereals to school, much to the consternation of the school’s admin officer.

I  would never advocate doing something ‘for Ofsted’ but it is the ability to be able to articulate this kind of  coherent curricular thinking that I assume Ofsted are looking for when they do their deep dives.

ks2 history out next week.

Over to you, Victoria.

Key Stage 1 History

The National Curriculum specifies four very broad areas of study for KS1. As these objectives are so open, there are multiple ways that they can be translated into units of work when planning the curriculum. Each objective will be considered in turn, with suggestions about how to select units of work, and how they could be sequenced.

When making these choices, the following factors would be useful to take into account:

• What will be studied in KS2 and KS3, as the KS1 curriculum needs to provide a good foundation of knowledge for children to build on later. You may want to consider planning the KS2 curriculum before you plan KS1, and if possible contact local secondary schools for details of their KS3 curriculum.
• Any gaps that may exist in children’s general knowledge when considering the KS2 curriculum you have planned. For example, as the KS2 curriculum mainly consists of periods before 1066, children may not have an understanding of what knights were and features of castles, which they will probably come across in stories.
• The texts you plan to teach across the school and the background knowledge needed to access these. How crucial is understanding the background knowledge to the plot? For example, when reading Room 13, a brief explanation of the dissolution of the monasteries to help children understand the history of Whitby Abbey would be useful, but it’s not necessary for them to have studied this in depth. However, if you intend to study Street Child, it would be important for children to have background knowledge of the Victorians in order to access the text.
• The history of the local area – which figures were important in the history of the area? Did any significant events happen locally? Are there any significant buildings, historic sites or local industries? Thorough research here will help you select topics that are meaningful to your pupils and that can enhance children’s understanding of local geography too.
• Themes that will help children to better understand how daily life has changed over time, and that are relevant to their own lives – houses and homes, school, transport, communication, toys, technology, jobs.
• Promoting British Values and children’s moral, social, emotional and cultural development, as well as adding to pupils’ understanding of diversity. For example, selecting the nurses Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole as significant individuals to study could provide rich opportunities for children to both develop empathy, and their understanding of how the nurses’ different backgrounds affected the opportunities that were available to them.
• Note that there is no requirement to select only one unit of study for each of the four bullet points, so if you have time you may choose to select two or three examples to teach some of the objectives.

Changes within living memory

The guidance in the National Curriculum is that these should be used to reveal aspects of change in national life. The broad themes listed above (home, school, transport, communication and technology) provide a useful focus for this area of study. When selecting which one(s) to focus on, consider those that are most relevant in your local area. For example, if your school has moved to a new building, changes in school life over time may be a good choice, or if there have been significant housing developments, changes to the size of the town and type of housing being built would be relevant. Opportunities for trips and visitors may influence your decision, for example if you have a local dockyard museum, canal or steam railway, changes in transport may be a good choice.

A unit of work on this objective could either track a theme, such as communication, through the decades from the 1920s to the present day, teaching about communication before the telephone, when telephones were commonly used in ordinary people’s houses, the introduction of the internet, ending with the wireless devices and smartphones we use today, and identifying how these changes impacted on people’s lives. Alternatively, life in a particular decade could be contrasted with modern life, looking at several themes such as homes, transport and communication.

Events beyond living memory

The National Curriculum specifies that these should be significant either nationally or globally. Suggestions are the Great Fire of London or the first aeroplane flight, although these are not statutory. Again the history of your local area can help to guide your choices – for schools in London, the Great Fire seems like a logical choice. Alternatively, you may wish to choose an event that is linked to one of the areas included in your geography curriculum.

Another suggestion in the National Curriculum is learning about events commemorated through festivals or anniversaries, for example learning about the reasons why we mark Remembrance Day each year. Themes that are not covered within other objectives could help with your decision – if you aren’t covering transport elsewhere, the first aeroplane flight may be a good way of filling that gap. Finally, consider any gaps in the KS2 curriculum. Are there any events that children will not have learnt about, that you consider are essential for children to know before they leave Year 6? This could be an opportunity to include these.

Lives of significant individuals in the past

The individuals you select must have contributed to national or international achievements. The important thing is that the people you select enable you to compare aspects of life in different periods. This indicates that the pairs of individuals you select should be separated by time.

This objective can be used to ensure that children have sufficient understanding of the features of periods that will be studied later, or that will be useful to provide background knowledge for reading or for local study in geography. For example, if there is a significant amount of Victorian history in your local area, you may select an aspect of Victorian life to study in KS2. In this case, comparing Queen Victoria with another monarch would support more in depth learning about the Victorians later. As a considerable number of classic children’s books were written or are set in Victorian times, comparing the life of a Victorian author with an author from a different period would enable children to access these texts more confidently.

Alternatively, you could select individuals whose lives provided opportunities to build on knowledge in other areas of the curriculum. For example, if the lives of explorers were selected here, that would provide opportunities to reinforce world geography knowledge such as continents, oceans and North and South Poles.

Significant historical events, places or people in your locality

You may want to make this choice last, so that you can choose an aspect or aspects of local history that does not already fit within one of the above three objectives. What have you chosen for your KS2 local history study? Think about what children will need to know to be able to access this unit of work. Would it be beneficial to select a unit that would provide children with useful background knowledge in KS1? Or is there another significant aspect of local history that children will not have the opportunity to study in KS2?

Suggested sequencing

As a general principle, learning should be sequenced so as to move from concepts that are ‘closer’ to children’s experiences in Year 1, to learning about more abstract concepts that are further in the past in Year 2. If you choose to do this, a logical way to sequence the objectives would be to cover changes within living memory and local history in Year 1, with the more complex changes beyond living memory and comparison of significant individuals’ lives in Year 2. However, the way you choose to sequence the units you have chosen is completely dependent on the particular places, people and events you will be teaching. For example, if you have chosen to teach both changes to transport within living memory and the first aeroplane flight, you may decide to start with the first aeroplane flight and then track changes chronologically to the present day. Or if your local study focuses on a Tudor house, this would naturally precede learning about the Great Fire of London. Additionally, links to geography and science may influence your decisions about sequencing. For example, learning about the Great Fire of London is enhanced by children having an understanding of the properties of materials, so it would be useful to place this unit after Year 2 science on materials.

Unit checklist

Does the unit include opportunities to:

• Identify similarities and differences between ways of life in different periods?
• Develop children’s understanding of chronology?
• Find out about the past from different sources of information?
• Ask and answer questions (following lines of enquiry)?
• Revisit and build on prior learning and key concepts (monarchy, source, community, chronology)? For example, remembering and ordering the names of previous monarchs studied before introducing a new monarch, or remembering the order in which significant events occurred, adding new events studied to the chronology previously learnt.
• Develop a thorough understanding of what is important about your local area, and how it has changed?