One of the biggest challenges, as a head of department, is delivering a curriculum that takes all your students from their starting point in Year 7 to their best possible endpoint in Year 11 or Year 13.
A huge part of this challenge is the scheme of work. Some heads of department buy in a ready-made scheme, some create their own from scratch, and some use a mixture from various sources.
Whatever type of scheme you use, the one thing that is really important to keep at the forefront of your mind is that no scheme should ever be static - it should be a fluid entity, responding to the needs of our students.
What makes a good scheme of work?
For instance, I created and introduced my own scheme of work back in 2016. At the time, I was pretty happy with it. But now, four and a half years on, it has been through numerous refinements and iterations, some smaller, some larger. Why? There are two reasons.
Firstly, it needed to be better. Some topics were rushed where some were given too much time. Some topics were better suited to a different time in students’ cognitive development and some topics just needed revisiting more often.
Secondly, the scheme isn’t a dictator. If I follow a scheme “because it’s the scheme” without careful thought to how it is implemented at every stage, and without making necessary adaptations to make it work for each group of children every time it is enacted, then I am a slave to a document and not a teacher making the best use of a framework.
The moment a teacher rushes through the content at the expense of learning (because that’s what the scheme of work tells them to do) is the moment when the curriculum stops working. Because a scheme of work isn’t a curriculum; a scheme of work is a subset of the curriculum.
The curriculum encompasses everything from the macro details (the thought processes that drive the entire learning journey) right down to the micro details (how each topic is taught in every classroom), and everything in between. Somewhere in this middle ground lies the scheme of work, as a framework for enacting the curriculum.
Schemes of work: GCSE and A level
It is an essential part of my job to talk with my team all the time about what is happening in classrooms from the point of view of curriculum. Do they need more time? How did the class deal with certain tasks? Does the learning flow from one stage to another in a way that enables students to gradually build their mental schema of the subject? What do they need to do differently next time? What do I need to change in the framework?
As a head of department, most of my thinking time is spent on these elements of the curriculum, including the scheme of work, and I am trying to focus more of our collective time on these important questions. The scheme of work guides us, then we reflect on it and refine it, so that it serves us better in future. It is through having professional discussions about how we, as a team, are going to implement the framework that we can hope to give the best experience of mathematics to as many of our students as possible.
Whether you are new to the head of department role or a seasoned pro, take a moment in your week to stop and consider how you might better approach your scheme of work and its implementation. Does it do the job you need it to - no more, no less? I ask myself this a lot and I hope I am getting some things right. The moment I know better, I’ll do better.
Jemma Sherwood is a head of maths and a National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics professional development lead. She tweets @jemmaths
