Further education and skills - at the Festival of Education 2023

One of the talks from our FES team at this year's Festival of Education which was held at Wellington College in July.

 

SPEAKERS

Becca Clare, Martin Ward, Mike Finn from the Further Education and Skills team at Ofsted.

High quality curriculum and teaching in Further Education and Skills.

I'm Becca Clare, and I have with me two colleagues, Martin Ward, and Mike Finn, and we all work within the FES part of the curriculum unit in Ofsted. We're going to tell you a little bit about our work within Ofsted, some of the work that we're doing looking at high quality curriculum and pedagogy. And we're starting to do work at the moment where we're researching what high quality curriculum looks like in Further Education and Skills providers in a range of subjects. We're currently focusing on a particular number of subjects that include business education, Martin, here is our curriculum lead for Business Education, Human Resources, Mike is our curriculum lead for human resources, but also Construction and Engineering employability programmes, ESOL, and software development and further education skills initial teacher education. So those are our initial wave of subjects. And when we're looking at how a curriculum is designed, we're looking at high quality teaching and wider processes and policies that support high quality education with a focus on those particular subjects. And we'd be really - this is a very genuine invitation - we'd be very delighted to hear from you, if you or your colleagues are working on curriculum design or pedagogy in those areas, in particular, and you'd like to share your ideas. So when we're out and about at events like this at conferences, we usually do get people who contact us afterwards and say, How can we be involved in this work. And we'd very much like to hear from you, if you think it's something that you'd be interested in doing. We may well go on and look at further subjects in due course as well.

So we're not we're not stopping there. So what we do is, essentially, what we're doing is we're drawing on the research and principles that underpin the education inspection framework. And looking at how the that research and those principles apply to a range of subjects in Further Education and Skills. We're drawing on that research, we're drawing on our expert working groups that we have around each of the subjects that we're looking at. And we'll be producing in the autumn, a series of publications in November, that look at those subjects in particular. And then in the last week of November, we're going to have a conference session in Birmingham on the 29th of November. Further details will be released soon. So I'm going to pass over to my colleague, Martin, who's going to talk about the content of the curriculum curriculum intent, in other words.

 

So what are we looking at in our work? A big focus for us is what constitutes a high quality curriculum in each subject to the further education context. And as you know, the education inspection framework, or EIF, focuses on the curriculum. And our view is that the curriculum is at the heart of good education. We don't specify what a given curriculum should look like. But our research underpinning the EEIF highlights a range of principles, which we in the curriculum unit are applying to a range of subjects and contexts in our work, you will know that the EIF focuses on curriculum intent, implementation, and impact. And intent is really two things, the content of the curriculum and the way it's sequenced or ordered. It's important that the curriculum content is ambitious, and providers need to have high expectations for learners and apprentices. And this doesn't necessarily mean a curriculum that's very broad, although it might be. But what it does mean is that the curriculum should focus on the most useful the most powerful knowledge and skills that experts agree are key in each context. In any subject, it's likely to be the principles and skills that really form the foundation of a subject. The things that our learner or apprentice needs to know if they are to develop expertise, rather than just operate within the confines of a narrow role. And it's crucial that the current current curriculum content is sequenced or ordered in a way that enables learners and apprentices to make good progress in understanding and skills from their starting points. So if the right foundations are laid, other knowledge and skills can be slotted in over time. So curriculum leaders need to give thought to the components of complex composite tasks, and plan a logical order in which to teach the components. And in the next two slides, we'll look at some examples of good quality curriculum content and sequencing within specific subjects. So here are a few examples within business education, we'll undoubtedly look at models and theories to explain the complex reality in which business operates. But in a high quality curriculum, not only will these models and theories be taught well, but through the curriculum learners will be taught about the nature of these models and their purpose, and that they are often an abstraction from reality, often holding some values constant, whilst trying to explain the impact of another value. Say, for example, in business, you might refer to the tendency for higher interest rates to reduce inflation, but also in a high quality curriculum realise that because of other impacts of costs of wages, or raw material costs, that this might not be immediately apparent in the real world. So getting an understanding of the value of models and theories across the business education curriculum. And in joinery and carpentry, this curriculum is often viewed from the perspective of practical competencies. There's nothing wrong in that at all. But the really powerful knowledge might also include an understanding of how wood grows, how this affects its qualities, and its strengths, its malleability. And therefore, although this is rarely taught, it is powerful knowledge, and certainly something that a master joiner would understand. And within employability programmes when developing professional behaviours, it's important to plan a wide selection of these behaviours and place important features like attendance and punctuality within a broader, ambitious context. And something that is something for all employees to embrace, and not just those at the start of their employment route. The same with careers advice and guidance, the curriculum should build to provide a big and extensive picture about the potential for a career for the potential for the learner over time, and not simply a narrow view of what employment might offer the learner at a single point in time at the beginning of their career. And within HR, within learning and development, an ambitious approach to teaching and the topic of training and development would be through teaching learners to understand Evidence Based Learning Theories before they consider how people learn at work, or start to develop training programmes in the workplace. Therefore, apprentices can draw upon evidence to understand what effective training and learning programmes look like. Apprentices should understand which theories are supported by research, as well as the limitations of those theories that lack credible evidence to support them. For example, learners who are taught about cognitive approaches to learning are more likely to consider effective pedagogy when developing training programmes. They can focus on strategies that are designed to improve an employee's ability to remember the content they're trained to understand, such as through repetition and retrieval practice over time, to embed topics in their long term memory. They may also think about designing training around what employees already know, so that employees are able to learn new material by linking this with what they have previously been taught. Whereas a less ambitious curriculum may focus on things like theories of learning styles, there isn't sufficient evidence to show the effectiveness of learning styles theory, and where learning styles are taught, inspectors should check that learners are aware of the criticisms of these theories and the potential lack of impact going forward. And within ITE or initial teacher training, the curriculum can be planned to demonstrate and explain the importance of subject specific pedagogy. For example, the teaching methods and types of resources that you should use in modern foreign language maybe be very different from those approaches in design technology. And it's also important particularly in apprenticeships, that where there is a highly practical curriculum that the underpinning knowledge and principles are taught so that learners and apprentices can apply their techniques better and understand how to adapt them to a range of different situations or customers. So as well as the curriculum content, we also need to make sure that the curriculum is sequenced in logical ways. And it may be different ways of sequencing in different subjects. So for example, in business education, it's really important that the constituent parts of a complex topic are taught in that particular order. So when teaching about the marketing mix, for instance, it's important that you look at the elements of pricing, product, place and promotion, before looking at the complex idea of marketing strategy. And also in ESOL, the sequencing of the curriculum and trying to get the right balance between the importance of particular settings, but also in making sure that learners understand the principles that underlie their long term learning of the language. And within the future of teacher education, it might be that the sequencing there rather than sequencing from topic to topic is actually a spiral curriculum where you have to address a range of different topics, and then go back again, and look at them in more depth over time, because in the teaching, teachers are already in the classroom. So they need to have a good understanding of a range of topics just to get started in the classroom. And then you can return to those topics in more depth to improve the quality over time.

There are also different types of knowledge, knowing that something, knowing how something works, and knowing when to use something. And it may well be that in some subjects, the sequencing of that knowledge over time is a valid and important approach. So for instance, in business, it's very important to know about stock control theories, to know how to use a stock control theory, and more importantly, knowing when to use it, to make sure that your business works efficiently. A particular challenge within further education is for apprenticeships, and sequencing off and on the job training. And what we find is that in high quality apprenticeships, the links with the employer mean that the off the job training is sequenced well and, and is taught before the apprentice goes on to the the factory floor, and actually uses that skill and knowledge in the place. And finally, in subjects like construction and hospitality and care. It's really important to teach about the primacy of health and safety. And that that is taught early in the course, but then also revisited over time to make sure that that learning is reinforced, as different contexts are met by the apprentice. So that's looking at the content and the sequencing. And Mike is now going to look at implementation.

 

Thank you. Yes, I'm going to be looking at curriculum implementation and what we mean by implementation is effective teaching, and effective assessment. Effective Teaching means focusing learners and or apprentices attention on the knowledge content, and helping them to remember it longer term. A key consideration is whether apprentices or learners are novices or experts. This distinction is actually more relevant than age. Research shows that novices need more instructional teaching about new content before they're able to use or apply this information to situations or case studies. However, for experts, teaching is more effective if experts get a chance to use the knowledge that they've already obtained and apply this to case studies, simulations, or situations. Now in Further Education and Skills, we naturally encounter a wide range of teaching approaches, from one to one sessions, through to university style lectures on the job demonstrations, classroom seminars, or sessions in a workshop. What's most important and essentially in all cases, the key question we will want to explore is, did the teaching methods used help learners to make progress through the curriculum? We've seen some good examples for instance of teachers using realistic hospital ward environments and medical dummies to teach nursing associate apprentices how to use the equipment they will need at work. In addition, we've seen effective practice in level two functional skills maths, where learners work through problems quietly with an expert teacher, consolidating their understanding of ratio, and proportion so that they can work out recipe quantities in their catering courses. Looking at assessment, we look to see whether assessment is being used in ways that help learners to make progress. Does assessment help teachers to spot gaps and misconceptions in learners knowledge? And where those gaps and misconceptions are identified? Do they use this information to take action to close gaps in knowledge or to correct misconceptions? Do teachers use assessment to adjust teaching or future teaching? For example, particular topics where reteaching might be required, or where particular learners may need further support and guidance? Do teachers assess what learners know and can do at the start of their courses? We know that learners can only learn new material if it's linked to what they already know. So looking at high quality teaching, teaching as a profession is evidence based, as for example is medicine. Evidence based approaches help learners to make progress. Cognitive Science is evidence based. It helps us to understand how to teach learners so they remember what they have been taught. Evidence based teaching is not about doing action research. It's about using what's already been credibly researched. Pedagogy and assessment should be driven by curriculum content. As Martin has pointed out, teachers should select high quality, ambitious content that will help learners to succeed on their course, and importantly beyond into their future career. As pointed out, this current curriculum content needs to be sequenced logically, so learners can build upon what they are learning. Our short term memories can become overloaded. Learners therefore need time to transfer what they are learning to their long term memory. This will then free up working memory to take in new information. So chunking information, and then using specific techniques that transfer information into long term memory is useful. So there's a range of particularly well researched, and evidence based teaching practices that I'm gonna go through with a couple of examples. Firstly, interleaving. This is where learners are learning multiple concepts or skills. This is different to blocking where you may, for example, teach one topic thoroughly, and ensure learners mastered this before moving on. So I'm gonna give you an example from mathematics, calculating volumes of different shapes alternating between these and revisiting. The calculations themselves differ. But all of those are similar enough to be interleaved. They're all types of calculating volumes. Another effective technique in terms of boosting memory is using spaced retrieval or spaced repetition. This focuses on teachers getting learners to retrieve what they have learned before, as that whole process of retrieving what you have learned helps to build your memory. Think about this though as pulling information out, rather than teachers cramming information in. So methods such as low stakes testing, quizzes, or setting questions from earlier lessons, or topics in the programme can be particularly effective here. So retrieval practice is most effective when you get learners to do something with the information rather than repeating the teaching. Another effective practice is dual coding. This is where you combine text and images or diagrams on resources. We know that visuals are powerful for communicating complex ideas in an efficient way. It takes a great many words to describe the simplest of images. less effective teaching may overly focus on strategies that are not backed by sufficient evidence. For example, selecting learning strategies to meet all learners learning styles. Teaching in essence, should focus on experts teaching content, it's important to note we learn what we pay attention to. Therefore, it is important that learning methods do not distract from learning. If, for example, there are too many social demands, attached to a task say for a group of novices, group work or presenting their ideas back, learners may focus on the social demands, rather than on the content they are learning. Effective in class assessment and questioning will ensure that if learners develop misconceptions or gaps in their knowledge, teachers will spot these and put them right or close any gaps in learning before they move on to something new. For apprentices, it's important for providers to ensure that on the job training is of a high quality on the job training should align well with what apprentices are being taught off the job. There should be access to useful and high quality opportunities for apprentices to put into practice, what they are learning about. Providers may want to consider who in the workplace is providing teaching or training support, and did they have the expertise they need to support apprentices. In 2022 Ofsted alongside HMIP undertook a joint review into reading education in prisons. And last week, a follow up report, reviewing the findings against last year's recommendations was published. This report has concluded while some progress has been made in meeting the recommendations set in 2022, improvements in key areas, such as screening, assessment, resourcing strategy development have been too slow. That's a really useful read if you're involved in prison education, reviewing the effectiveness of reading and the progress made in the last year. In terms of high expectations, this is demonstrated most forcibly by the study Pygmalion in the Classroom. And I'm not going to go through the full research with you now. But in essence, the research concludes that when teachers expect students to do well they do. And when teachers do not have such high expectations, performance and progress are not encouraged. So, really, teachers expectations influence performance. So what might effective practice look like in terms of high expectations? Well, teachers having high expectations about what all learners can achieve, not referring to groups as less able, more able, teachers setting ambitious goals for all learners, employers having high expectations and standards for trainees and apprentices. Teachers vary their support for learners but do not reduce the challenge for students. So for example, through avoiding differentiation by lower level outcomes. Teachers have high expectations for all including learners with special educational needs and or disabilities. There should be no limiting of the curriculum. In relation to continuing professional development, CPD, there are three particularly key areas to consider here. Firstly, that teachers remain up to date with industry practice. And this is vital for example, in engineering, understanding green developments in engineering. Training should also help teachers to maintain and update their subject knowledge. As I mentioned earlier, teaching is through expertise and therefore that's critical to effective teaching. So for example, expert teachers will provide clear explanations of content and they will ask useful questions. Third key element of effective CPD is effective training on pedagogy that considers evidence based approaches as I've discussed earlier. I'm now going to move on to look at the impact of the curriculum. First and foremost, what we're looking for when we're looking at impact is do learners make progress through the curriculum? Do they know more? And remember it? Can they do more than they could at the beginning of the programme? Do they improve their performance at work? So do apprentices gain promotions or increased responsibility? Do they achieve their qualifications? We always bear data in mind. But we will always use data to question and seek context. Where relevant do they progress to the next stage in their education successfully, including to higher education? And in some particular kinds of provisions such as high needs, we will want to know whether appropriate curricular goals such as increased independence or meeting ehcp outcomes have been met.

There are various ways you can get involved in our work, particularly if you're interested in the subjects that we've mentioned, through working groups through coming to our conferences, and through reading the publications that we're making, so do get in touch. If you think that you'd be interested in doing that.

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