Just one week left to... and 6 ways you can use us to help.
Hello everyone!
I know what you’re thinking: “What’s this? We Are In Beta news on a Monday?”
I’ve not been well this weekend and had to take a break. I hope you can excuse a slight deviation from the usual service.
So here we are. You thought it might never arrive. The last week of the toughest of academic years. I take my hat off to you. Make it a good one.
If there’s anything the community can help this week - six ideas below - just reply to this email or post a question on We Are In Beta.
We - schools - Are In Beta - always learning (especially when you have a community to help and well deserved rest on the horizon).
This week:
⏪ One week left to catch up on Curriculum Thinking Week.
🤝 6 ways we can help you this week (and beyond).
⏪ One week left to catch up on Curriculum Thinking Week.
If you aren’t a member of the Curriculum Thinkers Community, there’s just one week left to catch up with everything inside Curriculum Thinking Week.
ICYMI… 100+ brilliant subject leaders, nominated by our member schools, gave short, sharp talks (across 15 subjects) about how they are developing every aspect of curriculum in their departments.
👉 Watch all the 100+ talks, meet the speakers and access the 320+ resources here.
After 26th July they’ll only be accessible to members of the Curriculum Thinkers Community.
🤝 6 ways we can help you this week (and beyond).
Over the past year or so we’ve helped members find answers to their questions in a number of ways when they have asked us to help:
🌐 Making introductions.
We’ve found and connected leaders e.g. Heads of Maths, Science, Art, Careers, APs and more, who were happy to have a conversation and share curriculum resources.
📊 Designing snapshot surveys to gather practice from a range of schools.
We did one about year 7 curriculum choices across 50 MFL departments, another about Covid safety measures across dozens of schools, another about assessment practices across schools in the pipeline.
📎 Pooling plans and policies around specific areas of practice.
A while back we gathered PPM plans and evaluations, we also set up a shared drive in the run up to TAGs.
📱 Setting up Zoom meetings between leaders to discuss tricky issues.
Catch up funding and how they were approaching it was one topic of conversation.
🔬 Crunching the numbers to find high performing schools.
We’ve dived into DfE data to find: the most improved and highest performing secondaries; the highest performing sixth forms; the highest performing primaries for reading, wiring and maths; and the highest performing English and Maths departments in the country (all with a focus on disadvantaged students' outcomes).
🔎 Researching which organisations schools recommend.
A while back we gathered a list of who provides mental health and wellbeing training and services.
The We Are In Beta team has the time you’re struggling to find to do things like these that might just keep slipping down your (and quite likely many others’) to do list.
If you’re pushed for time and need a hand, let us help.
The chances are, when we do it for you, we can share the outcome with everyone else too. Happy days.
If you’ve got a project you’re working on or you want me to point you in the direction of any of the resources in this list, just hit reply to this email.
Thanks for reading.
Speak soon.
@NiallAlcock and the We Are In Beta team
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