Looking ahead to the 2024 MFL GCSE

Want to share with you through three stages the way in which I intend going about altering our curriculum offering for the new GCSE Spec.

If we turn around to our staff and say crack on and resource, it’s going to create a lot of work that isn’t strategically thought out or particularly well planned. This sentiment manifested itself in my team when we spoke about the new GCSE straight – just the mention of it caused panic and our job as leaders is to reassure and avoid panic.

To do this, in this blog, I hope to talk about how we can lay the foundations now through some simple alterations to the curriculum, make slightly bigger change gains by embedding them in the curriculum next year in KS3, before making bigger, more informed decisions that take time and involve more investment in time from myself and the our team as a whole.

The three-part process

In order to help the process of altering our curriculum plan, I decided to look at it as a three-stage process, which started earlier this year at the first mention of the changes and the initial draft specifications. It was about starting small – what small changes can we make to our practice to get good leverage on the changes at an early stage; what will be the big changes we need to make in the next teaching year ahead of the first students following the 2024 MFL GCSE course, before looking at bigger changes and choices that need to be made

1. Laying the foundations – small tweaks; big leverage

The first thing we have done to lay the foundations is to implement phonics in a consistent way. 

I have a team with huge experience, from someone who went from school to school with Sir Michael Wilshaw and was the founding Head of Faculty at my school for Languages and Vice Principal; to ECTs and all in between. ECTs and newer staff tend to onboard easier with new ideas than maybe some of the more experienced members, who may say, “well, I do it anyway” – but what I want is a consistent approach adopted by all. We tend to keep the same staff on groups all the way through, but if I can’t for whatever reason, cosistency is key, to ensure all have the same experience and can take the knowledge they have learnt with one member of staff to a different member of staff.

To avoid the ‘but I already do it anyway’ mentality, we have looked at involving all in the process. Myself and one of my post holders and the Head went to our primary school who had been massively praised by Ofsted to see how they were delivering phonics in English, so we could compare to the system we had drawn up.

I also went on early AQA webinars with some of the more experienced members of staff to involve their opinions and to see their thinking to cooperate them and seek their advice and opinions to onboard them with the curriculum change process. This helped to involve them in up-skilling themselves and let their voice be heard. The ECTs also had the opportunity to read the changes, too. This then fed into departmental CPD, co-led by myself and more experienced members of staff – allowing for leadership at all levels. 

Following this we came to our own phonics sounds which we arrived at through debate in CPD, with discussion and everyone’s input. We reviewed the latest phonics scheme of work offering by Viva, looking at where the sounds are taught and revisited, debating whether there was the need to revisit other sounds that are also present in certain units of work. Everyone involved themselves in the discussion – really refining the system and making it one we all believe will serve our students well.

Following the creation of the phonics system, we led some group deliberate practice sessions, before using observation to provide feedback on the delivery of phonics.

2. Creating the building blocks

For next year, we have decided to thoroughly audit what we have got. I want the process to be done timely but by no means rushed. Textbooks are coming out – and we do use them – and again, there is a decision to be made here, but a one that I do not want to rush and want to seek the team’s thoughts on, so it’s about what can we do until then.

Only three weeks ago we sat down together to map our the phonics explicitly on our schemes of work, cross referencing Viva and Dynamo phonics schemes of work and looking at the textbooks. We identified opportunities for retrieval that perhaps were skipped by the Viva and Dynamo schemes of work – allowing for interleaving and spaced practice. This again generated healthy, informative and deep discussion, involving all. 

Most of all, one of my big mantras regarding student engagement and getting students to take languages seriously is that students feel that they are in safe hands – in terms of staff knowing their specifications and that staff know how to get the students the grades, all they need to do is to meet those expectations. Therefore we will be carefully digesting the small print so we can teach the most effectively we can – looking at similarities, differences, key changes to papers and what we need to alter next year lower down in order to set students up well for Key Stage 4.

3. Looking further ahead

In terms longer-term changes, we will undoubtedly want to refresh what we do . To do this we will want to alter our resources to match the textbook that we chose to use. To get the changes to stick, I have created a lesson resource template that includes the non-negotiable that we believe underpins excellent teaching and learning, with lesson slides that contain spaces for extensions, all phonics slides already built in so that teachers just need to delete the ones they don’t want to change the default and make it easier to embed phonics in our resources.

As I mentioned earlier, I firmly believe that knowledgeable staff help make students feel like they are in capable hands and that they can achieve, therefore we will be attending many sessions and I will be encouraging the team to continue to examine so we can really get to know exam mark schemes inside out.