Focusing tightly on what your students need to know

You’ve already looked at how to work with the principle of ‘Measure it’. Next, you’re going to think about how to ‘Focus tightly’. This looks at how you can use what you’ve learned about your students to teach them what they need to know.

Although it’s important to practise the skills in lots of settings, this isn’t always enough. You can use the framework and other tools to teach the skills directly.

Over to you

Building core skills should build on each student’s previous learning and skills. It’s important to allow time to focus specifically on this.

• Do you have different skill goals for different students?
• Do you make time to just focus on explicitly developing skills?

Look at this extract from a report which summarises what an inspector discovered about enterprise education in a variety of schools.

‘The biggest weakness across schools visited was a lack of coherence in planning enterprise education… Pupils who spoke to inspectors during their visits frequently said that their experiences tended to be a series of one-off events that lacked any sense of progression.’

• Does this sound similar to your own experience?