Building a great curriculum in further education and skills

On this episode, we're talking to two further education and skills leads from Ofsted about the FES curriculum and what it means for students and teachers. And have you seen this report we've published into FES curriculums for business, both classroom-based and work-based?

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/further-education-and-skills-report-business-education

Anna Trethewey: So, today we’re talking about what high-quality education looks like in the further education and skills sector, with two FES Senior His Majesty's Inspectors – Dr Richard Beynon and Dr Becca Clare, from the FES policy team.

Richard, could you say, succinctly, what high-quality education is in FES?

RICHARD BEYNON: Yes, I’ll try. As with all education, the curriculum is the key. High-quality education means good curriculum design, coupled with effective teaching. And good curriculum design means selecting the content that is the most important and useful in a given subject, and then teaching the content in an order that helps learners to understand it. In maths, for instance, that means, probably, teaching learners to calculate area before volume. That doesn’t change, whether it’s further education or education for children.

The evidence shows that it’s really important to think about the key building blocks of a curriculum – what foundations need to be laid first so that learners can make connections and build secure knowledge? What we learn isn’t retained in isolation.

Instead, what we learn is connected in our memory to all kinds of other things we have learned before, and forms connections to things we learn later.

Sometimes we refer to knowledge as ‘sticky’ – that’s because some kinds of knowledge enable other components to ‘stick’ to them and this helps to expand our expertise in a given area. Think about the really fundamental knowledge in any subject – it’s probably like this. In English, for instance, if we know what a noun is, we can build on that to learn about sentence construction, proper nouns, collective nouns, abstract nouns. In maths, if we understand about division, we can go on to learn about fractions, peRebecca Clareentages, proportion, ratio and so on. In carpentry and joinery, if we learn about the properties of wood – how and why some wood is soft or hard, how different kinds of wood absoRichard Beynon moisture, structural defects such as knots – we can work out which kinds of wood are suitable in which situations.

REBECCA CLARE: So, the curriculum content that is selected and put in place early in the curriculum really makes a difference to what learners can learn next. We often explain this by using the image of a Jenga tower – what are the knowledge and skills that really need to be at the base of the tower? What do they support? What happens if that component is missing – what can the learners not learn, if they don’t understand division, or sentence structure, or the properties of wood, or basic sociological concepts like class and gender, or – in beauty therapy or health or sports - anatomy and physiology. The key thing is to select the really key content that learners need if they are to develop expertise in that subject. What are the foundation stones? What content needs to be in place to enable further content to be learned?

And in terms of teaching methods, it involves using methods that help learners really to embed the knowledge and skills they’re learning. I can remember – just – when I was at school, and quite often, as soon as I’d sat an exam, I’d forget the stuff I’d learned – because I’d only learned it for the exam. A really good education isn’t about just teaching to the test, though of course exam results matter. But it’s about teaching learners so that they can remember what they learn long term. Then, if they learn it well, they can use what they learn in their lives and jobs, they