Contribute to the creation of a culture of high expectations
across the school by:
• Articulating, modelling and rehearsing practices that contribute to the intended school culture and the
responsibilities every member of the school community has in its creation.
• Developing colleagues’ ability, through articulating, modelling and rehearsing, to contribute to the intended school culture within lessons and at other times during the school day (e.g. extra-curricular activities and lunchtime).
• Using intentional and consistent language that promotes challenge and aspiration for all pupils and colleagues.
• Creating an environment for all pupils and colleagues where everyone feels welcome and safe and learning from mistakes is part of the daily routine.

Contribute to the creation of a culture of professional learning and continuous improvement for colleagues by:
• Involving colleagues in the creation of short-, medium- and long-term priorities that will lead to improved outcomes for pupils and communicate these priorities regularly. 12
● Prioritising professional development and a shared responsibility for continuous improvement.

1. Learning involves a lasting change in pupils’ capabilities
or understanding.
2. Prior knowledge plays an important role in how pupils
learn; committing some key facts to their long-term
memory is likely to help pupils learn more complex ideas.
3. An important factor in learning is memory, which can be
thought of as comprising two elements: working memory
and long-term memory.
4. Working memory is where information that is being
actively processed is held, but its capacity is limited and
can be overloaded.
5. Long-term memory can be considered as a store of
knowledge that changes as pupils learn by integrating
new ideas with existing knowledge.
6. Where prior knowledge is weak, pupils are more likely to
develop misconceptions, particularly if new ideas are
introduced too quickly.
7. Regular, purposeful practice of what has previously been
taught can help consolidate material and help pupils
remember what they have learned.
8. Requiring pupils to retrieve information from memory, and
spacing practice so that pupils revisit ideas after a gap,
are also likely to strengthen recall.

9. Worked examples that take pupils through each step of a
new process are also likely to support pupils to learn.

Explain important ideas about how pupils learn to colleagues, including by:
● Introducing ideas about working and long-term memory.
● Articulating the role that prior knowledge plays in learning.
● Explaining the importance of practice in learning.
● Providing subject, phase and domain specific examples, as appropriate.

Support colleagues to help pupils learn by:
● Explaining how misconceptions develop and sharing approaches to prevent them forming (e.g. by talking to experienced colleagues).
● Highlighting the importance of sequencing lessons so that pupils secure foundational knowledge before more complex content.
● Providing examples of how to structure lessons to ensure that pupils experience a high success rate when attempting challenging work (e.g. with scaffolds to support success being removed over time).
● Additional examples of application are integrated into sections 4, 5, 6 and 7.

1. A school’s curriculum enables it to set out the knowledge,
skills and values that its pupils will learn, encompassing
the national curriculum within a coherent wider vision for
successful learning.
2. School subjects are their own distinct disciplines which
have reference points in disciplines and practices beyond
the school.
3. The potential content of many subjects (especially
literature, humanities and arts) is contestable and
requires thoughtful, sustained review and engagement
with that subject discipline.
4. Secure subject knowledge helps teachers to motivate
pupils and teach effectively.
5. Ensuring pupils master foundational concepts and
knowledge before moving on is likely to build pupils’
confidence and help them succeed.
6. Anticipating common misconceptions within particular
subjects is also an important aspect of curricular
knowledge; working closely with colleagues to develop an
understanding of likely misconceptions is valuable.
7. Explicitly teaching pupils the knowledge and skills they
need to succeed within particular subject areas is
beneficial.

8. For pupils to think critically, they must have a secure
understanding of knowledge within the subject area they
are being asked to think critically about.
9. In all subject areas, pupils learn new ideas by linking
those ideas to existing knowledge, organising this
knowledge into increasingly complex mental models;
carefully sequencing teaching to facilitate this process is
important.
10.Pupils are likely to struggle to transfer what has been
learnt in one discipline to a new or unfamiliar context.
11.To access the curriculum, early literacy provides
fundamental knowledge; reading comprises two
elements: word reading and language comprehension;
systematic synthetic phonics is the most effective
approach for teaching pupils to decode.
12.Every teacher can improve pupils’ literacy, including by
explicitly teaching reading, writing and oral language skills
specific to individual disciplines.

Support colleagues to design a carefully sequenced, broad
and coherent curriculum by:
● Ensuring colleagues recognise the inherent structures within subjects and identifying important knowledge, skills and concepts within them and the relationships between these components.
● Emphasising the value of ensuring pupils’ thinking is focused on important ideas within the subject and that multiple opportunities are provided to revisit these ideas over time.
● Sharing and modelling powerful analogies, illustrations, examples, explanations and demonstrations for colleagues to use in their teaching.

Support colleagues to develop pupils’ literacy by sharing and modelling approaches that:
● Use systematic synthetic phonics when teaching early reading phonics.
● Support pupils to become fluent readers (e.g. through guided reading or repeated reading).
● Improve pupils’ vocabulary (e.g. through explicit instruction and by planning for pupils to repeatedly encounter important words).

● Improve reading comprehension (e.g. modelling prediction, questioning, and summarising when reading).
● Increase the quality of classroom talk (e.g. modelling the use of technical vocabulary).
● Improve pupils’ writing (e.g. through modelling and by combining reading and writing tasks).

Support colleagues to plan effective lessons by:
● Providing examples of how components of effective lessons (e.g. explanations, modelling, practice and questioning) might interact, highlighting that no one single structure will suit every lesson.
● Explaining that critical thinking and problem solving rely on pupils having the necessary foundational knowledge and
that scaffolding should only be removed as pupils achieve high degrees of success.
● Emphasising the value of providing multiple opportunities for pupils to consolidate and practise applying new knowledge, skills and concepts.
● Explaining how to break tasks down into constituent components when first setting up independent practice.
● Ensuring that the teaching includes retrieval and spaced practice to build automatic recall of key knowledge and interleaving of concrete and abstract examples, slowly withdrawing concrete examples and drawing attention to the underlying structure of problems.

Support colleagues to explain and model effectively by:
● Providing feedback on explanations that highlights the importance of explanations that start at the point of current pupil understanding and include concrete representation of abstract ideas (e.g. make use of metaphors).
● Providing feedback on modelling that highlights the importance of narrating thought processes to make it clear
how an expert might think when completing the task, drawing pupils’ attention to links with prior knowledge, and
making the steps in a process memorable to ensure pupils can recall them (e.g. naming them, developing mnemonics,
or linking to memorable stories). Encourage colleagues to stimulate pupil thinking and check for understanding by:
● Supporting them to plan activities around what they want pupils to think hard about.
● Describing how a range of question types can improve the quality of class discussions (e.g. by modelling new
vocabulary or asking pupils to justify answers to extend and challenge pupils).
● Providing scaffolds for pupil discussion to increase the focus and rigour of dialogue.
● Suggesting approaches that support effective collaborative or paired work (e.g. clear success criteria, providing highquality models, providing explicit guidance on how to work together effectively) whilst highlighting considerations that may affect its success (e.g. pupils’ familiarity with routines, pupils having the necessary prior knowledge and how pupils are grouped).

Provide opportunities for all pupils to experience success by:
● Ensuring interventions and support from teaching assistants and other professionals are targeted and never used as a replacement for high-quality teaching.
● Providing examples of how to adapt lessons while maintaining high expectations for all, so that all pupils have the opportunity to experience success.
● Enabling colleagues to adapt lessons, make reasonable adjustments, and implement structured academic or behavioural interventions that are well-matched to pupils’ needs before seeking a diagnosis or specialist support.

Support colleagues to adapt their teaching to different pupil needs by:
● Sharing effective approaches for scaffolding new content and removing scaffolds over time.
● Using different forms of assessment (including specialist assessments linked to each area of need), including within lessons, to identify pupils who need further support.
● Ensuring colleagues are able to draw on support when teaching children with special educational needs and disabilities, particularly the Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO).

Support colleagues to meet individual needs without creating unnecessary workload by:
● Promoting the use of well-designed resources (e.g. existing high quality curricula and textbooks).
● Sharing and modelling effective approaches for intervening in lessons with individuals and small groups rather than planning different lessons for different groups of pupils or taking pupils out of classrooms for interventions during lessons.

Ensure pupils are grouped effectively (across subjects and within individual classrooms) by:
● Emphasising the need to maintain high expectations for all groups and ensuring all pupils have access to a rich curriculum.
● Ensuring that any groups based on attainment are subject specific, avoiding the perception that these groups are fixed.

Support colleagues to avoid common assessment pitfalls by:
● Providing examples of assessment designed to indicate understanding and inform teachers’ decision-making within a lesson (e.g. using hinge questions to identify misconceptions, using questioning to check that correct answers stem from secure understanding).
● Explaining that it is best to draw conclusions about what pupils have learned by looking at patterns of performance over a number of assessments.

Contributing to the design of school assessment systems by:
● Choosing, where possible, unedited, externally validated materials in controlled and uniform conditions when required to make summative assessments.
● Making use of well-designed resources (e.g. qualityassured, centrally created assessments and other highquality external assessment).

Support colleagues to provide high-quality feedback by:
● Providing examples of feedback that is accurate and clear, encourages further effort, and provides specific guidance on how to improve.

● Sharing approaches to peer- and self-assessment that are likely to increase its effectiveness (e.g. by sharing model
work with pupils and highlighting important details, and modelling metacognition in teaching).

Encourage colleagues to use high quality, reliable assessment without creating unnecessary workload by:
● Emphasising that written marking is only one form of feedback and explaining ways to use verbal feedback in lessons where possible.
● Sharing specific approaches that reduce the opportunity cost of marking (e.g. by using abbreviations and codes in written feedback).
● Prioritising the highlighting of errors related to misunderstandings, rather than careless mistakes when marking.

Contribute to effective professional development linked to teaching, curriculum and assessment across the school by:
● Aligning professional development priorities with wider school improvement priorities and focussing on a shared
responsibility for improving outcomes for all pupils.
● Making use of well-designed frameworks and resources instead of creating new resources (e.g. sources of subject
knowledge, the Early Career Framework and associated core induction programme for early career teachers, ITT Core Content Framework, suite of National Professional Qualifications,).
● Ensuring that time is protected for teachers to plan, test and implement new, evidence-informed ideas.
● Developing a team of colleagues who can facilitate a range of professional development approaches.
● Ensuring that colleagues are able to continually develop specialist subject, phase and domain expertise.
● Making reasonable adjustments that are well-matched to teacher needs (e.g. to content, resources and venue).
● Ensuring that any professional development time is used productively and that colleagues perceive the relevance to their work.

Plan, conduct, and support colleagues to conduct, regular, expert-led conversations (which could be referred to as mentoring or coaching) about teaching by:
● Building a relationship of trust and mutual respect between the individuals involved.
● Tailoring the conversation to the expertise and needs of the individual (e.g. adapting conversations to be more or less facilitative, dialogic or directive).
● Using approaches including observation of teaching or a related artefact (e.g. videos, assessment materials, research, lesson plans), listening, facilitating reflection and discussion through the asking of clear and intentional questions, and receiving actionable feedback with opportunities to test ideas and practise implementation of new approaches.
● Where appropriate, creating opportunities to co-observe a lesson segment, exploring and modelling what a teacher
with a particular area of expertise sees and thinks.

Avoid common teacher assessment pitfalls by designing approaches that:
● Ensure formative assessment tasks are linked to intended outcomes.
● Draw conclusions about what teachers have learned by reviewing patterns of performance over a number of assessments.
● Use multiple methods of data collection in order to make inferences about teacher quality.

Plan and execute implementation in stages by:
● Ensuring that implementation is a structured process where school leaders actively plan, prepare, deliver and embed changes.
● Making a small number of meaningful strategic changes and pursuing these diligently, prioritising appropriately.
● Reviewing and stopping ineffective practices before implementing new ones.

Make the right choices on what to implement by:
● Identifying a specific area for improvement using a robust diagnostic process, focusing on the problem that needs
solving, rather than starting with a solution.
● Providing credible interpretations of reliable data that focus on pupils’ knowledge and understanding.
● Examining current approaches, how they need to change and the support required to do so.
● Adopting new approaches based on both internal and external evidence of what has (and has not) worked before (e.g. pupil outcome data and research-based guidance).
● Ensuring it is suitable for the school context, recognising the parameters within which the change will operate (e.g. school policies) and where the school is in its development trajectory (e.g. addressing any significant behaviour problems would be an immediate priority).
● Assessing and adapting plans based on the degree to which colleagues are ready to implement the approach (e.g. current staff motivation and expertise).

Prepare appropriately for the changes to come by:
● Being explicit about what will be implemented, and the overall desired outcomes.
● Specifying the elements of the approach that appear critical to its success (i.e. the ‘active ingredients’) and communicating expectations around these with clarity.
● Developing a clear, logical and well specified implementation plan, and using this plan to build collective understanding and ownership of the approach.
● Using an integrated set of implementation activities that work at different levels in the school (e.g. individual teachers, whole school changes).

Deliver changes by:
● Managing expectations and encouraging ‘buy-in’ until positive signs of changes emerge.
● Monitoring implementation (including by clearly assigning and following up on the completion of critical tasks) and using this information to tailor and improve the approach over time (e.g. identifying a weak area of understanding and providing further training).
● Reinforcing initial training with expert follow-on support within the school.
● Prioritising the ‘active ingredients’ of the approach until they are securely understood and implemented, and then, if needed, introducing adaptations.

Sustain changes by:
● Using reliable monitoring and evaluation to review how the implementation activities are meeting the intended objectives and continue to align with school improvement priorities.
● Continuing to model, acknowledge, support, recognise and reward good approaches.
● Treating scale-up of an approach as a new implementation process (e.g. from one department to another).

Communicate a belief in the academic potential of all pupils,
by:
• Using intentional and consistent language that promotes challenge and aspiration.
• Setting tasks that stretch pupils, but which are achievable, within a challenging curriculum.
• Creating a positive environment where making mistakes and learning from them and the need for effort and perseverance are part of the daily routine.
• Seeking opportunities to engage parents and carers in the education of their children (e.g. proactively highlighting successes).

Demonstrate consistently high behavioural expectations, by:
• Creating a culture of respect and trust in the classroom that supports all pupils to succeed (e.g. by modelling the types of courteous behaviour expected of pupils).
• Teaching and rigorously maintaining clear behavioural expectations (e.g. for contributions, volume level and concentration).
• Applying rules, sanctions and rewards in line with school policy, escalating behaviour incidents as appropriate.
• Acknowledging and praising pupil effort and emphasising progress being made.

Communicate a belief in the academic potential of all pupils,
by:
• Using intentional and consistent language that promotes challenge and aspiration.
• Setting tasks that stretch pupils, but which are achievable, within a challenging curriculum.
• Creating a positive environment where making mistakes and learning from them and the need for effort and perseverance are part of the daily routine.
• Seeking opportunities to engage parents and carers in the education of their children (e.g. proactively highlighting successes).

Demonstrate consistently high behavioural expectations, by:
• Creating a culture of respect and trust in the classroom that supports all pupils to succeed (e.g. by modelling the types of courteous behaviour expected of pupils).
• Teaching and rigorously maintaining clear behavioural expectations (e.g. for contributions, volume level and concentration).
• Applying rules, sanctions and rewards in line with school policy, escalating behaviour incidents as appropriate.
• Acknowledging and praising pupil effort and emphasising progress being made.

Communicate a belief in the academic potential of all pupils,
by:
• Using intentional and consistent language that promotes challenge and aspiration.
• Setting tasks that stretch pupils, but which are achievable, within a challenging curriculum.
• Creating a positive environment where making mistakes and learning from them and the need for effort and perseverance are part of the daily routine.
• Seeking opportunities to engage parents and carers in the education of their children (e.g. proactively highlighting successes).

Demonstrate consistently high behavioural expectations, by:
• Creating a culture of respect and trust in the classroom that supports all pupils to succeed (e.g. by modelling the types of courteous behaviour expected of pupils).
• Teaching and rigorously maintaining clear behavioural expectations (e.g. for contributions, volume level and concentration).
• Applying rules, sanctions and rewards in line with school policy, escalating behaviour incidents as appropriate.
• Acknowledging and praising pupil effort and emphasising progress being made.

Communicate a belief in the academic potential of all pupils,
by:
• Using intentional and consistent language that promotes challenge and aspiration.
• Setting tasks that stretch pupils, but which are achievable, within a challenging curriculum.
• Creating a positive environment where making mistakes and learning from them and the need for effort and perseverance are part of the daily routine.
• Seeking opportunities to engage parents and carers in the education of their children (e.g. proactively highlighting successes).

Demonstrate consistently high behavioural expectations, by:
• Creating a culture of respect and trust in the classroom that supports all pupils to succeed (e.g. by modelling the types of courteous behaviour expected of pupils).
• Teaching and rigorously maintaining clear behavioural expectations (e.g. for contributions, volume level and concentration).
• Applying rules, sanctions and rewards in line with school policy, escalating behaviour incidents as appropriate.
• Acknowledging and praising pupil effort and emphasising progress being made.

Communicate a belief in the academic potential of all pupils,
by:
• Using intentional and consistent language that promotes challenge and aspiration.
• Setting tasks that stretch pupils, but which are achievable, within a challenging curriculum.
• Creating a positive environment where making mistakes and learning from them and the need for effort and perseverance are part of the daily routine.
• Seeking opportunities to engage parents and carers in the education of their children (e.g. proactively highlighting successes).

Demonstrate consistently high behavioural expectations, by:
• Creating a culture of respect and trust in the classroom that supports all pupils to succeed (e.g. by modelling the types of courteous behaviour expected of pupils).
• Teaching and rigorously maintaining clear behavioural expectations (e.g. for contributions, volume level and concentration).
• Applying rules, sanctions and rewards in line with school policy, escalating behaviour incidents as appropriate.
• Acknowledging and praising pupil effort and emphasising progress being made.