by Ged Rae, Continuous Improvement Partner
Edited by Mark McCourt, CEO
Walk into two classrooms teaching the same curriculum and you can encounter two very different lessons.
The pupils may be studying the same topic. Their teachers may be working from the same curriculum and following the same broad principles of teaching. Both may be conscientious, experienced professionals. Yet in one classroom, an explanation unlocks an idea. A carefully chosen example exposes a misconception. A question makes pupils think again about something they thought they understood. In the other, the lesson is perfectly competent, but something is missing.
What accounts for the difference?
For much of my career, I would probably have looked first to pedagogy. Over the past year, I have become less certain that this is enough.
Schools have become considerably more sophisticated in how they think about teaching. We specify curricula more carefully. We think about sequencing, assessment and memory. Multi-academy trusts have developed shared teaching principles intended to make good practice more consistent between classrooms and schools.
At Academy Transformation Trust (ATT), we have done much of this ourselves, and I genuinely believe it has improved teaching. But our experience has also exposed a limit to what our current frameworks can achieve.
A stated curriculum cannot teach a child.
Nor, on its own, can a set of pedagogical principles. Both must be interpreted by a teacher, dozens of times during a lesson. Should I give another example? Which one? Why have these pupils misunderstood this idea? Is this error trivial, or does it reveal something important? Which question will tell me? Is there a connection here to something pupils learned six months ago? What is it about this particular concept that makes it difficult?
And these are not principally questions of compliance, which our frameworks are good at strengthening. Thinking hard about this has led me to realise these are questions of expertise.
Consider the apparently simple business of choosing an example. An expert mathematics teacher knows that changing one feature of an example while holding another constant can direct attention towards a particular mathematical structure. An expert historian knows that a source is not simply an opportunity to practise generic “source skills”, but an artefact whose meaning depends on provenance, context and the historical question being asked. An expert science teacher knows which everyday intuitions about force, energy or evolution are likely to lead pupils astray.
The important knowledge is therefore not merely knowledge of a subject. It includes knowledge about how the discipline works, how its ideas fit together, where novices commonly go wrong and which representations, explanations and examples are most likely to help.
This is what I mean by disciplinary expertise.
Clearly, this presents school leaders with an rather tricky problem. Systems are relatively easy to scale. Expertise is not.
A trust can specify a curriculum. It can establish routines. It can create assessment systems and define expectations for classroom practice. There are good reasons for doing all of these things. But none guarantees that a teacher will make the right decision when a pupil gives an unexpected answer at 10:17 on a Tuesday morning in December.
Indeed, there is a danger in responding to variation in teaching by specifying ever more tightly what teachers should do. The attraction is obvious. If excellent teaching is inconsistent, codify it. Describe the behaviours, monitor their implementation and intervene when they are absent.
This can improve weak practice, particularly where expectations have previously been unclear. But taken too far, it mistakes the visible features of expertise for expertise itself.
A checklist can tell me to check for understanding. It cannot tell me which question will reveal whether a pupil really understands quadratic factorisation, photosynthesis or the causes of the English Civil War. A framework can remind me to model. It cannot decide what a revealing model looks like in Year 2 music or A-level chemistry.
Those decisions depend upon what the teacher knows.
This has changed some of our thinking at ATT. We have spent several years strengthening curricula across our academies, with better sequencing and greater clarity about what pupils should learn. The problem we are now grappling with is enactment: what happens when that planned curriculum encounters actual pupils in actual classrooms.
We have many examples of exceptional practice across our trust. What we cannot yet say is that every pupil experiences that quality consistently. The question is how to spread expertise without turning good teaching into a compliance exercise.
One response has been our Enactment Standards. These describe important features of the classroom experience we want pupils routinely to encounter. Their value, however, will depend on how we use them. If they become another grading device, their usefulness will be limited. Their more interesting potential is as a common language through which teachers can examine and improve practice.
But standards alone cannot solve the problem. The more significant opportunity may lie in the expertise that already exists inside our schools.
Like many trusts, ATT has subject communities. Traditionally, such groups can drift towards administration: sharing materials, passing on information, discussing specifications and agreeing what needs to happen next. All of that has a purpose, but it barely scratches the surface of what becomes possible when teachers of the same discipline work together.
Imagine instead a group of history teachers examining why pupils routinely struggle to understand causation. Or mathematics teachers comparing different examples for introducing simultaneous equations. Or English teachers looking closely at pupils’ essays and asking what their errors reveal about how they understand the text.
This shift in conversation makes the time set aside for communities to meet far more impactful (and far more intellectually enjoyable for the teachers involved). Teachers are no longer merely agreeing what to do. They are making their professional knowledge visible to one another, stress testing ideas, extending their thinking, holding each other to a higher intellectual bar.
This is powerful because much expertise in schools is tacit. An excellent teacher may instantly recognise that an example will confuse pupils, but struggle to articulate precisely why. Another may have developed a particularly effective explanation through years of experience without ever having had cause to dissect it. Put knowledgeable teachers together around sufficiently precise problems and some of that tacit expertise can become collective knowledge.
That, I think, is one of the largely unrealised advantages of a multi-academy trust.
Scale is usually discussed in operational terms: procurement, staffing, finance, shared services and standardisation. But a trust of 22 schools also contains thousands of teachers and an enormous reservoir of accumulated disciplinary knowledge. The interesting question is whether that knowledge can travel.
It will not do so automatically. Nor will another layer of meetings make it happen. Subject communities must become places where professional claims can be examined rather than merely exchanged: where teachers compare explanations, scrutinise pupils’ work, test assumptions against evidence and disagree productively about what good teaching looks like in their discipline.
There is a wider point here about school improvement.
Education has a recurring appetite for universal solutions. This is understandable. Leaders responsible for thousands of pupils need approaches that can operate at scale. But teaching contains an irreducibly intellectual component. The better the teacher understands what they are teaching, how that body of knowledge is organised and how novices come to understand it, the better equipped they are to make the decisions that no framework can make for them.
Pedagogy still matters. Curriculum design matters. Standards matter. But perhaps we should be a little less interested in whether teachers are faithfully reproducing the visible features of good teaching, and considerably more interested in whether they are becoming more expert.
For ATT, that distinction is central to our ambitions for 2030. We want every young person leaving our schools to be capable, confident and competent. Whether that happens will ultimately depend less on the elegance of our frameworks than on the quality of the decisions made in classrooms every day.
The challenge now is to create an organisation in which the best professional knowledge does not remain trapped in particular classrooms or departments.
If we can do that, consistency need not mean compliance. It can mean something much more important: more teachers, in more classrooms, possessing the knowledge and judgement to make better decisions for the pupils in front of them.
