Senior leadership guidance

Senior leadership guidance

This page guides you through the four key steps of getting started with Maestro. You may wish to bookmark this page to reference later.

Step 1: Administration

Getting started with Maestro is very straightforward, but it does require some administrative tasks to be completed before staff can begin using the projects and all of the available features. The tasks below must be done by one of the school’s Curriculum Maestro Administrators (we recommend that you have three, normally the headteacher, another senior member of staff and the school administrator).

  • Getting started: Inviting, editing and removing users
  • Getting started: Classes and pupils

Info
Once these tasks have been completed, you’re ready to go!

Step 2: Curriculum statement (optional)

Before choosing your projects, you might want to spend some time thinking about the underlying principles and purposes for your school’s curriculum (best done with the staff team to achieve consensus).

You may already have a curriculum statement, but it might be worth a revisit as you take on a new curriculum or evaluate your existing one. The article below will help with these discussions and is useful as prior reading/listening before discussions begin.  

Once you have established a consensus about the school’s general principles and aims, it’s time to consider how you might achieve these through your curriculum design.

Step 3: Design and create your curriculum

Your curriculum should reflect the unique characteristics of your school or the strengths, talents and interests of your teaching staff or children.

Our specialist primary curriculum team have taken great care to build and resource a high quality and well-connected curriculum model to save you time and give you a starting point. If you want to find out more about this Curriculum model, and how we've developed it to ensure sequencing, progression and coverage, please read our article on the Cornerstones Curriculum​.

Most schools choose to start with one of our curriculum models, then build and adapt it for their school, however, Maestro also gives you the tools you need to build your own curriculum. Your curriculum can be constructed using the tools within Maestro which will enable you to view and compare Cornerstones projects​, add your own school projects​, check coverage and progression and review the sequence of learning.

This article will help you to design your curriculum.

Step 4: Introduction to staff

Once your curriculum has been designed, it’s almost time for teaching staff to begin using the projects and resources. As well as familiarisation of the tools and the functionality of Maestro, there are some other fundamental elements of designing your curriculum with which leaders may wish to talk through with staff members before teaching begins. You might also want to take a look at this article: How to make teacher workload work (cornerstoneseducation.co.uk).

Idea
Tip: Remember, we do offer free online training and support, so please do not hesitate to get in touch if you would like to arrange this. 

Discussing the elements below before teaching the projects will ensure that decisions can be made about how the materials will be used in the school, thereby ensuring coherence and consistency. We've also put together some useful questions to help prompt discussion.

  • The importance and role of the Big Ideas and how they underpin and permeate the curriculum. Staff should be aware of the reasons behind the Big Ideas and how they support the creation and delivery of a coherent, joined-up curriculum.
  • Which subjects to teach through Maestro, or whether to teach some using the school’s existing schemes of work, such as SPaG. This is most often related to English and religious education, but other subjects could be taught discretely.
  • The importance of teachers using their professional skills and knowledge of their pupils to amend, extend or modify the delivery of the projects as required. Cornerstones projects provide the framework for an engaging, well-structured and ambitious curriculum, but there are features that allow teachers to amend lessons by adding extra details, and amended objectives if needed. The work done on designing the school’s curriculum ensures that the underlying progression and coverage are secure, but teachers should know that it is their responsibility to modify the materials at the lesson level, so that they match the needs of their pupils and result in exciting and relevant content for their class. 
  • The importance of using the Teach, Taught and Assess button after each lesson, or at the end of the day/week. Teachers should be aware that this function enables leaders to check that there is no mismatch between the intended curriculum and the actual curriculum. It also allows the assessment features to be utilised if the school chooses to use them.
  • Use of resources: the resources provided in Curriculum Maestro are of high quality and designed specifically for the projects. Schools may wish to agree on policy on the use of resources, such as the knowledge organisers, home learning tasks, parent information, glossaries and display materials, so that there is consistency of use across the school. Staff should be made aware that within the Resources tab>Generic section,  there is an editable resource pack (for ILPs only) should they need to create additional resources to help differentiate for individuals or groups. These packs will be particularly useful for mixed aged classes.
    • Help Centre article: Project content and resources
  • The importance and organisation of Memorable Experiences and other out of classroom experiences. The number and type of experiences can be planned for pupils in each year group by examining the Memorable Experience in each project and by taking account of other activities planned for the pupils, such as swimming or Forest Schools. By discussing the school’s attitudes to and beliefs about the role of such experiences and planning for them, it will be possible to create a coherent and broad range of experiences linked to pupils' learning. This will ensure that pupils experience a range of experiences and that no type of experience is repeated too frequently or omitted.
    • Help Centre article: Curriculum Statement
    • Help Centre article: Planning events
  • Measuring pupil progress through the curriculum. Maestro includes a system of teacher assessment, as well as formal tests for reading, SPaG and maths. Schools may wish to use these features and, if so, will need some discussion about how assessment will be organised across the school.
    NB: Teachers should use the Teach/Taught/Assess button (either within the project or from their timetabled lessons) after each lesson so that leaders can check delivery against intent.  Leaders may also wish to discuss at this point details of curriculum monitoring, such as book reviews, evidence required and, of course, talking to children.
  • Teacher assessment. Discussions about assessment could include how frequently each subject should be assessed, whether to use simple or detailed assessments and how assessments will be evidenced and moderated across the school.
    • Help Centre article: Developing an assessment policy
    • Help Centre article: Teacher assessment
    • Help Centre article: Analyse teacher assessments

What support can we offer?

As you may be thinking about the year ahead, we wanted to let you know some of the ways in which Cornerstones can help you.

Support
Our friendly and knowledgeable curriculum advisers can provide you and your staff with training on all aspects of Curriculum Maestro.

Maestro support
  • Training for any new staff members: An introductory session to show staff how to use the everyday functionalities of Maestro as well as the curriculum structure and pedagogy on Maestro. This could also be delivered to all staff as a refresher session to ensure that they are up-to-date with any new updates on Maestro.
  • Refresher training for existing staff: This can be bespoke to the needs of your school and what your staff needs to go through again and also to make them aware of any new tools or functions they are unaware of.
  • Assessment and data analysis training: To gain further understanding of how to use the different assessment tools, such as adding data, analysing and reporting this.
  • Curriculum review or set-up: Our curriculum advisers can work with schools to help set up their new curriculum for the first time and to support SLTs who wish to update their curriculum for the next academic year.
 
We also provide:

Subject leadership training
We offer a range of bespoke subject leadership training that looks at history, geography, science, art and design and design technology. In these sessions, our advisers will guide your subject leaders through the tools on Maestro that can support them through an Ofsted deep dive. They may focus on national Curriculum coverage, knowledge and skills progression, sequencing of lessons and specific functions of our Maestro platform that will support them to articulate their subject clearly and confidently.

Ofsted support
Our experienced curriculum advisers will support SLTs to understand how to best use Maestro to guide them during the inspection process. This can be bespoke to your school's needs to ensure that staff are confident in talking about their curriculum.
 

Useful questions

Questions that may be useful during discussion might include:

  • Do we all understand what the Big Ideas are, what their purpose is, and how we can track them/demonstrate coverage of them through the curriculum?
  • How will we incorporate the Cornerstones pedagogy into our teaching, and what implication has this got for planning, the timing of projects and classroom practice?
  • Are we going to teach some subjects discretely? How will this be organised?
  • How will we approach building our curriculum? Do we want to use subject-focused Knowledge-rich projects (KRPs), cross-curricular Imaginative Learning Projects (ILPs), or a combination of project types?
  • Will we use White Rose Maths, Love to Celebrate, and Love to Investigate to enhance our curriculum provision?
  • What are the expectations with regard to planning?
  • How will teachers ensure that lessons planned for pupils match their needs, interests, and abilities?
  • What features of Curriculum Maestro and classroom practices will be used to ensure consistency of approach across the school?
  • What curriculum enrichment activities are planned for pupils, and how will these enhance learning?
  • How will we demonstrate progress and achievement throughout the school? How will the curriculum be monitored by leaders?

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