Key Stage 3 Regional Pilot
Aquinas Grammar School, Belfast
The following information is a transcript of an interview conducted with the pilot school at the end of the first year of the pilot
Aquinas Grammar School is a young school which first opened its doors in 1993. As such it does not have a long established academic history. While it offers a full suite of GCSE, AS and A2 subjects and can boast very good results in all of these, it has also been open to innovation not only in curriculum content but also in methodologies, teaching styles and approaches. The Revised Curriculum then has not necessitated a huge amount of formal planning as the school is already practising many of the approaches included in it. There has already been some strategic planning, but the school is conscious of the fact that this is a Pilot Scheme and advice and guidance from outside agencies is still evolving and being developed. The interviewees indicated that although each subject area has now laid down their plans for Year 8 in the new academic year, the Senior Management Team are sensitive to the fact that further planning both inter and intra departmental, and at whole school level, lies ahead.
The school has been flexible in its approach, while all departments have had the opportunity to study the common documentation which has been dispatched periodically to the school, they have had opportunities to discuss and decide as departments how TS and PC could be facilitated through their subjects. The school has welcomed the chance to embrace the innovations implicit in the new Revised Curriculum and believed that the programmes of work can be tailored to the needs of the pupils within each school.
AFL has already been addressed within Aquinas, with staff having attended INSET Courses outside. They, in turn have, conducted “in house” training days for all staff. The school has welcomed the concept and principles for AFL inherent in the Revised Curriculum and recognise that much further work lies ahead in this area. The interviewee indicated that 2 connected projects would probably be run for every year group in Key Stage while the delivery of Learning for Life and Work was already discretely timetabled and will remain so for the duration of the Pilot. The interviewees made a number of suggestions, these included:
- Schools are aware of the educational requirements specific to their own pupils and thus should be given the flexibility to adopt their own approach to the implementation of the Revised Curriculum
- The role of the agencies within the PMB needed to have better definition for the implementation of the Revised Curriculum
A number of issues were also identified in the planning process, these included:
- Clarification is needed as to what will exactly follow on GCSE and the Revised Curriculum, in Key Stage 4 and beyond. How does it fit with GCSE’s
- Much more time is needed to complete the planning process and to evaluate the work already done
- More training is needed for staff in their subject areas
- Teachers require more “INSET” days to examine the processes needed for delivery within the classroom as it was felt that process is going to be as important as content