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Curriculum: reporting to governors
Use our template report and guidance to inform your governors about your curriculum journey – it includes questions governors might ask.
Contents
Ofsted's 2019 inspection framework has put curriculum in the spotlight, so your governors are likely to want regular updates on your work in this area.
Below you'll find a template you can use to update them on your school's curriculum development journey – but remember, your board can decide the scope and format of the reports you provide to them (as per page 22 of the Governance Handbook) so check first that this is what they need from you, in case you need to adapt it.
Download our template curriculum report
It has 3 sections:
- Current curriculum provision – what it looks like now
- Curriculum development – what you're doing to improve it
- Action plan – what you've done so far and what you're going to do
It includes:
- Suggested areas to cover in your answers
- Questions that your governors might ask you – reflect on these while you complete this report, but don't prepare detailed answers, as the questions might not all come up in your meetings
Tips for reporting curriculum delivery
You'll need to update governors on how teachers are implementing the curriculum in practice.
In the implementation section of your report, consider including:
- The programme of lesson observations
- What the focus of lesson observations is and how it feeds into school development planning and continuing professional development (CPD)
- How lesson observations address school improvement priorities and concerns around quality of education
- The number of lessons observed that are good or outstanding, and whether this number is increasing
- What pupil progress is like in lessons
- The training/CPD policies and procedures in place for teachers to improve practice and tackle under-performance
- How competency issues are tackled sensitively but consistently to support teachers and enable them to do their best
Other sources of evidence can include:
- Pupil progress – you could look through the Analyse School Performance (ASP) data and have governors ask questions about it
- Pupil voice
- Monitoring of marking
- Statistics and case studies
Remember: keep evidence about individual teachers anonymous.
Kate Foale and Joanne Fay, our associate education experts, gave us this advice.
Find out more about how Ofsted will judge teachers under 'implementation', in the grade descriptors section of this article.
Reviewing your curriculum?
Use the curriculum development tools in our curriculum resource hub.
Sources
Kate Foale has extensive experience as a primary and secondary school governor and is a national leader of governance. She has also worked as an adult education lecturer with specialisms in effective communications, strategic planning and managing change.
Joanne Fay is an experienced governance consultant. She produces and delivers general and bespoke training to governing bodies and chairs.
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