“Maths – I don’t think they know what we did in primary, so we just do it again.”
That was a Year 7 pupil responding to Ofsted’s 2015 report, Key Stage 3: the wasted years? Another said the work was “too easy and not challenging” and that they finished it very quickly. These are pupils asking us to take their learning seriously.
Catherine Priggs and I returned to that report in this week’s Inside The Ambitious Years webinar. The question behind our work is simple: what would KS3 look like if we treated these years as the intellectual foundation of secondary education?
It starts with knowing what pupils have already encountered, then building on it. Repetition has a place when it helps pupils deepen their understanding; being taught something as though it were new, when they met it years ago, is a different experience altogether.
It also means giving pupils access to the substance of a subject. In one of our history units, pupils read extracts from Le Roy Ladurie’s account of Montaillou, a medieval Pyrenean village. They meet the historian’s words and interpretations, consider the lives of different villagers, and work towards their own answer to the question: What can Montaillou reveal about life in medieval Europe?
That kind of work requires thoughtful sequencing and support with demanding text. It also conveys something to pupils about what we believe they are capable of.
Eleven years on from Ofsted’s report, those Year 7 comments are still a useful test: are we finding out what pupils know, and are we giving them something worth thinking hard about?
If you missed our conversation, the recording is now available. Cat and I explore what an ambitious KS3 can look like, with examples from history, geography and RE:
You can watch the webinar recording here.
Until next time
Mary