Inspecting the Cornerstones Curriculum
The Cornerstones Curriculum is a fully sequenced and connected curriculum that spans from Nursery to Year 6. This curriculum helps you to meet requirements set out in the national curriculum and Ofsted Inspection Framework, enabling children to build knowledge and understanding over time, while offering rich, broad and engaging content.
How is the Cornerstones Curriculum fit for the current inspection framework?
Ofsted does not have a preferred model for the curriculum. However, the current Ofsted handbook states that even those schools who take a radical approach to the curriculum will be treated fairly if they can evidence that their curriculum meets the framework's requirements.
If leaders can show that they have thought carefully, that they have built a curriculum with appropriate coverage, content, structure and sequencing, and that it has been implemented effectively, then inspectors will assess a school's curriculum favourably.
Ofsted Inspection Handbook for Schools 2021
The Cornerstones Curriculum is not a radical approach. It is a systematically designed curriculum that enables schools to achieve the sought-after triangulation of a well-sequenced curriculum, well-structured and consistent teaching, and meaningful assessment approaches.
What do I need to show to an inspector during an inspection?
To explain how your whole curriculum is sequenced and connected requires a high level of knowledge of a mass of complex information. Often, we can fail to impress on others the intricate sequencing, connectivity and mastery within a curriculum because of the amount of information we need to present.
The inspection framework states that evidence about the curriculum will be gathered by methods including:
Discussions with pupils and staff; listening to pupils read; and looking at examples of pupils’ work for evidence of progress in knowledge, understanding and skills towards defined endpoints.
Ofsted Inspection Handbook for Schools 2021
Inspectors will not expect to see files of printed information, nor do they expect you to spend your time preparing reams of additional paperwork for them to read. This is why we've launched a new tool, CurriculumPRO, to use during your curriculum discussions that will help you to articulate all the essential information you need to explain your curriculum. We have also provided subject overview documents, located in the Library, that you may publish on your school website.
Inspectors have been specifically trained to look at any relevant information in either hardcopy or electronic form.
How does the Cornerstones Curriculum ensure that children make progress?
The Cornerstones Curriculum is underpinned by our progression framework. The framework is a sequenced and interconnected set of skills and knowledge statements. Each statement contains objectives - core knowledge, hinterland and broad knowledge.
This framework provides the structure for learning and the endpoints that the curriculum builds towards. The number of skills and knowledge statements in the framework is broadly proportionate to the number of programmes of study for each subject. This enables teachers to plan for and deliver each subject in line with realistic time allocations.
Some schools like to break the statements down into smaller, more detailed lesson or group objectives, which is fine, but to ensure progression, these should match to the sequence of skills and knowledge in the framework and teaching all the component knowledge across all subjects supports full schema development.
The pre-planned lessons within each project are sequenced so that new skills and knowledge build upon what has been taught before, and towards the clearly defined endpoints. As Ofsted often puts it, the curriculum itself is the progression model.
Ready to create your curriculum? Next step: Design a new curriculum
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