Are you ambitious for your pupils?
There are few people working in education who would say that they are not. Even those few people who say, “This is the best we can expect from these kinds of pupils” (and sadly they are still out there) believe themselves to be ambitious; they just need to recalibrate what their pupils can achieve.
And this is the central problem with talking about ambition. I have seen from my visits to countless schools over the years that ambition is incredibly important, but it is also incredibly difficult to pin down.
One thing that makes defining ambition so difficult is that it requires very detailed subject and age-specific knowledge. What should a Year 4 pupil be able to do in art? What is an ambitious piece of work for an A-level art student? What are you using as a benchmark other than your own experience? Do you know what other teachers can achieve? And even if you have a really clear sense of what children up and down the country of that age in the very best schools are achieving in that subject, do you know what that child can achieve?
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Now take that thought process and expand it to not just every subject for every class or year group but also for all those other things that schools do. An ambitious careers programme? An ambitious extracurricular offer? How about ambition in terms of pupils’ behaviour? What does any of this look like?
Answering that final question is what great schools do. They actively seek examples of what pupils are capable of at different ages and in different subjects and they look at the processes that made it possible and then see if they can achieve the same in their own context.
Low expectations
Too often, ambition for what pupils can do is just too low. In the past, this was especially true in key stage 3, where pupils rarely went beyond what they had already learned in primary school (see, for example, Ofsted’s report Key Stage 3: The Wasted Years).
Although this is now less common, it does sometimes rear its head. This is especially true in subjects where it is intended for pupils to revisit concepts, but for material to become more complex over time. What can happen is that the curriculum doesn’t spiral upwards but just goes around in a circle.
For example, in most primary schools, pupils will learn about the tropical rainforests of Brazil, the habitats found there and the threats they face. In theory, the ambition of the curriculum should increase in KS3.
Students could then learn about contrasting rainforests and look at why pressures are different there. They could explore what makes rainforests more fragile ecosystems than others or the driving forces behind trends in deforestation. They could learn how geographers evaluate the success, or otherwise, of attempts to protect globally important rainforest reserves. Any of this would be more ambitious. However, what tends to happen when ambition goes wrong is that they just repeat the same lessons they had a few years before.
Occasionally, things go wrong in the other direction, and the ambition is too high. What this usually means is simply that pupils do not yet have the prior knowledge to make sense of new information or to complete the activity they have been given. It isn’t that there is something inherently too difficult about the subject matter.
The importance of looking outward
Schools that are highly ambitious for their pupils have a very strong sense of what their pupils are capable of. To do this, they are outward looking. They work across a trust or collection of local schools to get a sense of what is being achieved elsewhere and, more importantly, how it was achieved.
These schools also recognise that ambition, as a concept, never sits alone. You cannot be ambitious in isolation of other factors that lead to ambition being achieved. Crafting an ambitious curriculum takes time as careful steps need to be planned to allow pupils to get to those endpoints. There also needs to be an investment in maintaining the knowledge of teachers and giving them the time to develop and reflect on the subjects that they are teaching and leading.
Perhaps the most important thing that amazing schools do in terms of ambition is that they give pupils the opportunity to actually do something ambitious with what they have learned. This may sound self-evident, but it is amazing how many times you see pupils busy working through a series of lessons around a topic, slowly building their knowledge and then they move on to something else. There is no sense of completion.
Schools that are truly ambitious for their pupils make sure that there is time for everything to be brought together so that pupils can create ambitious pieces of art, perform ambitious pieces of drama, write ambitious essays that answer ambitious questions and argue ambitious points.
Mark Enser is an author and a head of geography in a school in North West England
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