Designing A Curriculum For Belonging And Inclusion

Recently I had the pleasure of talking with Phil Banks and Danielle Lewis-Egonu for an episode of their The Kitchen Table Podcast. We talked all about designing curriculum intentionally so that all children benefit.

Here's a few snippets of the episode to whet your whistle:

So much of this work is about adopting a can-do mindset, and not settling for less:

But this work has to be done with teacher wellbeing in mind as well as what's best for the children:

"If you can work out what is going to be the best way to teach the child is going to struggle the most with that piece of content, then most probably you've just found the best way to teach it, full stop.

And if you've found the best way to teach that thing, then teach that thing [that way].

Now, that doesn't take into account the fact that in any given lesson your children absolutely will have different starting points.

It doesn't mean you can just teach the same lesson to all the pupils and everyone will be fine, but I think it helps us go some way towards a more workload friendly way of thinking and working.

If we found what works for the child who's going to struggle the most with that concept, then we probably found the best way of teaching it and all children will benefit from that."

Here's the full episode on Spotify:

Here's the apple podcasts link, too: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/designing-a-curriculum-for-belonging-and-inclusion/id1873835916?i=1000763721130

Why do we have to really make sure we get curriculum right? Because so often curriculum can exclude children, and turn them off learning:

"You can be really exclusive with your curriculum if there are certain parts of it which are just so far beyond the pupils who you are going to learn it... this is not about low expectations, it's not about dumbing it down, but it's about making it accessible and it's about making all pupils feel like school is a place for them because learning is for them.

And if you have a pupil who constantly sits through a lesson thinking I've not learned anything, they're going to think being in the classroom is not for me, being in the school is not for me, education is not for me and more broadly than that, learning is not for me.

But learning is a lifelong thing. We need to do it our whole lives. We cannot be turning children off and and basically turning them away from learning at this early stage. We need to make sure that what's in our curriculum is really and truly something that they can learn for that reason."

If this podcast episode really resonated with the work you're doing in your school, and you think working with me would move things forward, all you have to do is:

1. Drop me an email

2. We'll arrange a phone call

3. We'll get a date in the diary to work together

Or, you can simply get something booked in straight away:

Consultancy Day

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