Plan and Teach an Ambitious Curriculum

Traditional differentiation can slide into dumbing down, so some pupils never meet the hardest ideas in your subject. If you lead a subject or a phase, you're in a position to stop that happening.

Think of a route on a map: you need the destination and the starting point before you can plot the way between them. You'll write a curriculum vision your team can test every decision against, and decide what pupils should know by the end, drawing on ideas like powerful knowledge. Then you'll find out what pupils really know when they arrive, which is more than their transition data tells you.

From there, the case is for teaching to the top. Exit tickets and hinge questions show you where each pupil's struggle zone is, so the work stays hard but achievable. It works well as the basis for a leadership team discussion.