Subject leader guidance
We now provide subject leader guidance packs for your school. You can find these in the Library>Cornerstones Curriculum. Each subject has a guide located in the Supporting documents folder.
This page guides you through how to use the tools on Maestro to support subject leaders with an Ofsted inspection. You may wish to bookmark this page to reference later.
Overview
The Cornerstones Curriculum aims to provide schools with an ambitious curriculum with a clear sequence of learning. It is important as a subject leader that you can articulate clearly about your curriculum – why things are taught and when they are taught. You need to understand the journey from when children come into your school to when they leave it. Maestro provides you with the toolbox for your curriculum so that you can adopt and adapt to personalise your curriculum so that it fits your local context, meets the needs of your children, and facilitates the chosen teaching styles your school has in place.
In their article, What to expect on a primary deep dive – some guidance for subject leaders, Heather Fearn and Jonathan Keay (2nd February 2022) set out how an inspection team will undertake a deep dive in schools,
We’re likely to want to talk to whoever leads a subject as close to the start of a deep dive as possible. This helps us have a sense of the ‘big picture’. We’ll understand if the subject isn’t an area of specialism for you. What matters most is what you want pupils to learn and why. We don’t have any expectations about what paperwork schools provide and you can bring any notes you might wish to refer to during the discussion. It is up to you how you record and set out your curriculum expectations. We’ll ask questions and consider things like:
- Does the subject curriculum match the scope and ambition of the national curriculum?
- Are there clear end points?
- Can we see how content is broken down into manageable chunks to build towards those end points?
- Are the identified chunks logically sequenced? Do they prepare pupils for the learning that is to come?
After exploring the overarching curriculum content with questions like the ones above, we’ll explore how you choose to teach and assess the content. During the discussion, we’re also likely to ask specifically about any lessons we are able to see as part of the deep dive. This helps us see your intended curriculum in action. We’ll hopefully be able to see the chunks we talked about being taught and practised. We’ll start to understand how well pupils are remembering the content and using it to understand more complex ideas or answer more complex questions. Remember that, if we do visit lessons, it isn’t to judge teaching.
So how does Curriculum Maestro empower you as a subject leader to be well-equipped for a deep dive?
Ongoing support
This can be found in a number of places on the home screen:
- The Live Chat function in the bottom right-hand corner of the home page takes you through to our office between 8.00am and 5.00pm (Monday-Thursday), 8.00am and 4.00pm (Friday). Here you will be able to gain advice and support from a Curriculum Adviser.
- The Help Centre in the left-hand menu on the home page contains many useful articles. This includes podcasts, blogs, and the latest research around curriculum. This will help you to speak knowledgeably about your curriculum and the rationale underpinning it. The Pedagogy and Curriculum Guidance section is especially helpful.
- The Messages on the right-hand side of your home screen provides you with the latest news and updates from the Cornerstones team. As a subject leader, you are kept informed of any new projects or materials that have been released.
Library
On the left-hand menu on your home page, you will see the link to the Library. Here you will find additional resources. The sections shown below are especially useful as a subject leader. You will find more information about the Big Ideas – themes that run through the Cornerstones Curriculum across the different subjects.
In the Cornerstones Curriculum (England) folder you will find the suggested project sequencing overviews, as well as details about the structure of the Cornerstones Curriculum. There are also single-subject overviews, which provide an explanation of how individual subject content for art and design, design and technology, geography, history, and science are sequenced across the Cornerstones Curriculum.
Curriculum Intent
To support this, the Design and Lead section located on your left-hand home page menu takes you into everything you will need.
In the curriculum statement there are prompts and questions to help you think about where your subject fits into the wider curriculum offered by your school.
In View and compare projects, you can go through your subject from a subject leader perspective. Start off by selecting your subject area in the bar at the top of the page. Ensure that you set the filter for your school’s live curriculum.
This will load up the projects where your subject is the main driver for the acquisition of skills and knowledge or where there is some coverage for your subject within that project. It also enables you to see immediately the links made with other subjects and an overview of what the project is about. You can also “heart” projects and this will save these on your home page as favourites, providing you with a library of projects for your subject.
From this page you can click onto a project and it will take you into the overview where you can see key vocabulary and gain an overview of the programmes of study and knowledge and skills being covered.
Again, you can see how your subject is linked to other areas of the curriculum and how it is being enriched through memorable experiences and texts. If you click 'View lessons and resources', then you will be able to see fully how the project unfolds across the four Cornerstones of Engage, Develop, Innovate and Express. You can look at each project from the point of view of 'Stage / Subject'.
This page takes you into several other pages which will help you as a subject leader to:
- Talk about practical resources so that you can plan budgets for the year ahead and liaise with other subject leaders, class teachers and SLT to ensure that as a school you have everything needed to deliver the projects planned. In Resources you can see the specific materials produced in the Cornerstones Curriculum, which can be used and adapted to deliver the lessons planned.
- Talk about the English pack to show how foundation subjects are being used to deliver reading and writing opportunities, thus supporting with issues around crowded primary timetables.
- Relate back to pedagogy and ambition, so there is access for all through scaffolding, use of resources, seating plans and additional adults.
Coverage and progression
If you select 'Live Curriculum', then you have the opportunity to interrogate about coverage and progression.
On the Coverage screen you can select your subject area and you can also filter for particular curriculum aspects, year groups and programmes of study.
So that you can secure a picture of what you would expect to say if you were carrying out any monitoring work across school, you can check on this page to see what coverage should look like. You can then check this through book looks, lesson drop-ins, pupil discussions and learning walks. By clicking on any of the green lozenges containing numbers, a screen will appear detailing the lessons where that programme of study is expected to be taught. It also then informs you of the skills and knowledge being developed in that lesson.
For more information and support on any page, don’t forget to press on the 'Instructions' in the top right-hand corner of your page. This will bring up an information box with further information.
On Intended progression, you can see how objectives are sequenced and progressive across the years related to particular aspects or Big Ideas.
If you click on 'covered', you will see which projects cover the statement for that year group.
By clicking on 'Lesson/s', you can then see the lessons which cover the statement within the project. This equips you well for all monitoring activities and informs your overview of what is actually being taught across school and how well the children are accessing and retaining the knowledge and skills that have been planned.
Subject lesson sequence
In Subject lesson sequence you can set the tool bars at the top of the page to your curriculum area, your live curriculum and specific year group you wish to look at. This will bring up the projects so that you can see everything you need to know about the programmes of study, knowledge and skills being covered. You would also be able to see any adaptations to lessons made by teachers who have personalised the learning for their classes.
Curriculum Implementation
To ensure you can articulate around implementation, look at our Plan and Assess section in the left-hand menu.
Class plans
In Class plans, you can add plans, cycles and projects to your curriculum. Classes can be assigned to plans and projects can be re-ordered by clicking the number of projects in the plan and dragging and dropping the project images.
Class plan details
In Class plan details, you can set your live curriculum and the year group you want to look at. This will bring up an overview of projects for that year group. As well as being able to see the content overview for your subject, you will be able to see how this links to other areas of the curriculum.
By clicking on 'Options', you can change the page view to give you a format that is preferable for your purpose and personal taste. Below you can see the table view.
Actual coverage
In Actual coverage you will be able to see what has already been taught and when the remaining content is planned to be taught. Green lozenges indicate that a programme of study has been fully taught, an amber lozenge shows that a programme of study has been taught on at least one of the planned occasions and a red lozenge shows that there has been no coverage as yet of a particular programme of study.
By clicking on a lozenge relating to a particular project, you will be able to see details of the lessons taught and when. This is helpful in informing book/work scrutinises and pupil discussions for your subject monitoring.
Teacher assessments
Going to Teacher assessment, by setting the school year, term, year group and subject, you can gain an overview of how class teachers are judging attainment for their classes. This is something that you can triangulate through your subject leader monitoring and review activities.
You can click on the number of objectives taught/attained in each year groups skills column to see more specific details. By clicking on the side arrows, you will get more information on how well that objective was attained, when it was taught and by whom. Again, this is helpful in informing book/work scrutinises and pupil discussions for your subject monitoring.
Curriculum Impact
In order to secure an overview of the impact of your school’s curriculum you can go into Analyse and Report in the left-hand menu. Here you will be able to access a number of reports to inform your overview of how well children are performing in your subject.
Class Attainment
In Class attainment you can set the filters along the top for year group and subject. This will provide an overview of how well each child is performing.
You will be able to see exactly which skills and knowledge objectives have been taught to each child and how successfully they have attained them.
Having all this information at your fingertips as a subject leader will equip you well for any conversations with external inspectors or consultants.
Governor report
At some point, it is likely that you will be asked to present to your school’s Governing Body about your subject or that you may be required to meet with a Governor who has oversight of your subject to talk about provision in the school. The Governor Report is available to provide you with anonymised data that could be shared with governors so that they have an overview of specific groups and year groups.
Subject progression report
The Subject progression report provides you with bar graph comparisons to show percentages of children who are on track and not on track. If you switch the option to show pupil names on, then you will be able to see which children are in each attainment group.
Curriculum Inspection
A great tool for all subject leaders on Maestro is CurriculumPRO (through your left-hand side menu). This allows you to secure your knowledge of the picture in school. In Subject narrative, you can see how particular projects build on prior knowledge. This ability to articulate about sequencing and progression is crucial as a subject leader.
Year group narrative provides you with a snapshot view of your subject across a particular year group in school. This helps you to articulate to parents, SLT, governors, consultants or inspectors about the progression and sequencing of your subject.
In Subject sequence you can clearly see the programmes of study, aspects, knowledge and skills for all year groups. You can use the filters along the top to show as much or as little information as you require.
If you need to articulate about the Big Ideas then go on to Big idea interconnections, choosing the specific Big Idea you want to look at.
If you need to look at when and where a particular concept is taught, then go into Concept search. Choose the concept you want to look at and then this will bring up all the projects in which it features across the school. When you have finished, remember to clear the choice of concept in the selection lozenge.
The Cornerstones Curriculum is designed to provide opportunities to teach vocabulary linked to all subjects and provide opportunities for children to use this regularly. As subject leader, you can go into the Subject vocabulary option, and this will show you the vocabulary being taught in each year group, for each project.
Summary
In summary, Maestro is your toolbox to enable you to understand fully what the coverage actually is in your school and know how it is taught. By using the tools we provide, you should understand any adaptations made by your school, such as in mixed-age classes, to ensure that the required content of all programmes of study is taught by the end of Y6 and that you know what the end goal is in Y6.
The final words come again from, What to expect on a primary deep dive – some guidance for subject leaders, Heather Fearn and Jonathan Keay (2nd February 2022):
Do leaders of a subject need to be specialists?In primary schools, particularly small ones, we know that staff wear lots of hats. In small schools, it may be the headteacher who oversees all subjects. It often isn’t possible or realistic to develop detailed expertise in multiple subject areas – neither do we expect you to. What is important is that, as a collective, staff give careful thought to the content they want pupils to be taught and to remember.To overcome the challenges of expertise in multiple curriculum areas, lots of schools work with other local schools to design their curriculum. Schools also make use of schemes of work that are developed by subject specialists. Ofsted does not consider it necessary for schools to design their curriculums themselves. Whatever it is you do, it hasn’t got to be all singing and dancing. Your curriculum just needs to be ambitious and coherent.What about small primary schools?In a typical year, Ofsted inspects around 1,300 primaries. Our inspectors will be aware of the impact of an inspection visit on teachers in a small school. Right from the first contact with the school, our lead inspectors will work with the headteacher to organise the inspection to manage the demands on each teacher.We also know that small schools won’t necessarily have the capacity to provide the same resources and experiences as larger schools. That is why the deep dive will focus on what matters most for the quality of each pupil’s education: whether pupils are learning the knowledge they need to achieve the goals of their education.
Related Articles
Teacher guidance
This page guides you through the six key steps of getting started with Maestro. You may wish to bookmark this page to reference later. Tip: To be able to start planning properly and using the features mentioned below, you will need to ensure that you ...English pack guidance
The English packs have been written by our in-house Primary English specialists, who have years of subject leader experience. The packs are based on a rigorous, progressive framework of skills, which was created by unpacking the national curriculum ...Subject progression report
The Subject progression report allows you to view all the Teacher assessment information for a class or cohort in a single subject. The Teacher assessment data that has been recorded from each term for that class or cohort for all terms will be ...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 ...Book and novel study guidance
A novel study is a set of resources that support children’s reading comprehension skills in guided reading groups or whole class sessions. Each driver project includes a novel study. A novel study may take a half term or a whole term to complete. In ...