It’s probably fair to say that there’s no sign of things “winding down” in the final days of this longest of terms, so the news that Ofsted inspections won’t take place will be welcome even if a little short of what many might have hoped for.

That being said, unless things change significantly, it seems that the plan is for inspections to return again in the New Year.

For some schools, it will be a welcome comfort if it means the opportunity to move out of a category and reflect work achieved over the past years, but for many others, it’s yet another task on the to-do list at an already incredibly busy time.

For that reason, it’s important school leaders are clear on exactly what is required of them when it comes to inspection and - just as importantly - what is not.

In that sense, the latest blog from Ofsted offers some limited comfort for schools as two of its inspectors set out the case for why they carry out curriculum “deep dives” during a visit and why this should not be something schools fear - or that requires more paperwork.

‘Curriculum intent’

The reason schools have previously been wary of the deep dives goes back to 2019 and the inspection framework’s reference to “intent, implementation and impact” of curriculums.

This led many school leaders to believe that reams of paperwork were needed under these headings. There’s certainly no shortage of school websites with pages headed “curriculum intent”.

But, as Ofsted themselves say in the blog, intent is not another level of planning or evidence; it should be as simple as knowing what you want your children to learn

“Subject leaders do not need to prepare special documentation for Ofsted on intent, implementation and impact. For Ofsted, intent is simply what you want pupils to learn.” [Ofsted’s emphasis, not mine].

So if your school has a long term overview of its curriculum, then you’re surely most of the way there?

It certainly sounds that way, which should be comforting to leaders and their teams that yet more paperwork is not required. 

That’s not to say that nothing has changed of course.

The clear direction of travel since 2019 has been to develop a clearly sequenced curriculum that allows children to securely grasp the content taught. If you take it out of the context of an inspection, that makes perfect sense.

In fact, for many years teachers have argued that the volume of content in the curriculum was a barrier to children really understanding what they were learning.

Now it’s clear that Ofsted agree. When they look at a curriculum subject, they’re not only interested in what is being taught, but whether it is being learned.

As their recent blog says, the race through the curriculum too often left children with an insecure grasp of learning because there wasn’t enough time to revisit the key ideas.

Showing your working

So how do we square this circle?

It’s certainly not the case that the curriculum has rapidly slimmed. But there is scope for schools to choose carefully between units and the depth that they study particular content. It’s here where a school’s intent comes into play.

If making the time for a climate-linked strand through your curriculum means that you focus in less depth on prehistoric Britain, then make that clear to your inspectors.

This is how schools can now take control of inspections on their own terms.

One of the oft-heard comments about the new inspection format is that it takes some of the control away from school leadership and puts more pressure on the wider team - and my own experience suggests that there’s some truth in that. But that’s not to say that drilling middle leaders in deep dives will necessarily help.

While time to think about school development might have been squeezed over the past two years, there’s no doubting that thinking about curriculum has been repeatedly needed.

As children missed huge chunks of time in school, it became necessary to make decisions about units of work that lent themselves to working from home and those that required a teacher’s face-to-face input. With children returning with significant gaps, the judgements necessary to decide work that should be prioritised and areas that could be condensed may well form part of your thinking about curriculum intent.

It’s what we do

So perhaps rather than training each subject leader to answer questions based on a list downloaded or shared from another school, a better approach is to consider the curriculum in the round, whether that be in subject departments or across primary schools.

Time spent on articulating your shared thinking about what the priorities are for your children are at the heart of what curriculum intent implies.

And the practice of the last two years will hopefully demonstrate how you have taken steps to implement that intent - not because Ofsted demand that it does, but because planning what to teach, and then teaching it well so that children learn it, is what we do.

The challenge then is not to write a new document, or to rote learn some good responses to difficult questions; rather, our time should be spent collaborating to design the best curriculum we can for our pupils and then being ready to explain how we went about it.

And that, at least, would be time well spent.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at East Preston Junior School, in West Sussex