Subject leadership
in the Primary school
Leading a subject can be a rewarding responsibility but also a daunting prospect if you have no experience of how to lead development with colleagues rather than students. This page should help give you the minimum expectations that a subject lead should carry out. Use these as a benchmark for developing your own practices.
Maths subject lead template
I have led many subjects but my most important and long lasting role was as Maths Subject Lead. I led maths for 12 years and was able to raise attainment levels at the end of Year 6 from 14% below national average to 12% above national average. I did not do this on my own and it is important that your role is valued by senior leaders, that you are given the time you need to carry out effective leadership and you know what good leadership looks like. The following advice is in the form of a Maths lead but the ideas can be applied to any subject.
Your subject knowledge
It is important that you have a wealth of subject knowledge with which to answer questions from your colleagues. This will build up the longer you are in post but it is important that you start with a thorough understanding of the National Curriculum in your subject and any important documents that cover your subject. Ofsted and the Department for Education publish subject reviews and summary documents from inspections.
Click on the government logo to select the National Curriculum for your subject area.
Click on the books to find the Government subject reviews and choose the latest one for your subject area.
Find useful websites for your subject area. I like these 2 for maths because they have articles and research available to support the subject lead with their own subject knowledge as well as lesson supports.
If you are using a scheme, their website should offer you advice and information about the scheme itself, how it links to the National Curriculum and teaching overviews.
Basic documentation
Before you start your new role, you should have an Action Plan established. The Action Plan should cover the academic year as a whole. You may have the luxury of a hand over with the out-going subject lead and can discuss the results of the previous year to form your Action Plan but this is unlikely. Your Action Plan should reflect the targets of the School's Improvement Plan or Development Plan and add in any other high priority targets in your subject area. A maximum of 5 overarching targets will be enough for the Action Plan.
An Action Plan should contain your actions in priority order so Target 1 should be your most important priority for the school year followed by each target in decreasing importance. Each overarching target is broken into smaller, more easily achieved, targets with time limits and responsibility identified. You should be very clear on what success looks like and tick off the smaller targets as they are achieved. The overarching target should be reviewed termly. Use the Action Plan as a working document and write on it as things happen or you make changes and update the plan with termly reviews.
ACTION PLAN
CURRICULUM MAP
You will need to identify when and where the different topics within your subject are taught.
A maths curriculum map could show each year group in turn or a termly map with all the year groups together.
A foundation subject might be less detailed with the Year group and topics taught.
PROGRESSION DOCUMENT
Schemes usually have progression grids and an array of other documents that will help you understand the scheme or curriculum and support your colleagues with unit and lesson planning. A progression grid will show how the skills and knowledge within your subject area build on each other as the children move through school. These progression grids support teachers to pitch their lesson at the correct level of learning and enable your school to produce children with a subject specific range of skills that have been reinforced and consolidated at a deepening understanding as they age through school and a broad knowledge of topics within your subject. A progression grid can be at the end of a key stage or yearly.
A progression grid takes a single knowledge area and tracks its development through the year groups or the end of each key stage.
Handbook
Some core subjects may require other progression documents such as a Calculation Policy or a Mental Maths policy for Maths or a Core Story policy for Literacy. I always liked to do a Yearly Handbook for my core subject (but not my foundation subject). It outlined the Intent, Implementation and Impact statements within my subject and provided the staff with a detailed outline of practice and procedures within my subject in school.. The 3 is, as they were called, are out of fashion now but I found it very useful as a layout for key information within my core subject. Click on the document to download a copy if you want a look.
Monitoring, feedback and evaluation
Monitoring, feedback and evaluation of your Action Plan targets and the general quality of teaching and learning in your subject area is vital if you are to be in control of standards in your area.
ACTION PLAN
Your Action Plan drives your monitoring and evaluation timetable. The small steps for success in your Action Plan should include monitoring and evaluating of the overall target. You should triangulate feedback from teaching and learning, books and data on a termly cycle to support your Action Plan review.
Some of your targets may require CPD or the implementation of a scheme in the Autumn Term before you can begin to monitor its effectiveness and in these cases the Teaching and Learning outcomes for that term may simply be that you have carried out CPD and that staff are confident using the new scheme, that the books show everyone is using the new scheme in each lesson and the data provided at the end of the term showed that no one had fallen back as a result of the new scheme.
TARGET - effective differentiation for SEND children
Teaching and Learning
shows engagement, learning attitudes, participation, teacher knowledge, questioning, behaviour
Data
shows attainment, progress and trends
Books
shows pitch, challenge, differentiation. organisation and layout, frequency of lessons
Other targets may be more established. An example may be 'Effective differentiation for SEND children' where training was provided the previous year and staff were asked to practice with a range of strategies in their lessons. This year you want to check that staff have selected an effective strategy for their SEND children and so you might want to carry out lesson observations and talk to SEND children with their books. You will then use the SEND children's data at the end of the term to check if these strategies have worked for improved attainment. Your triangulation of these 3 areas may show strong practitioners in certain classes.
Feedback should always follow monitoring but there are many forms of feeding back to staff and children. Feedback should always be constructive and motivational and should support the improvement of your subject area.
Shared planning is a great way to share the evaluation of a lesson. Select a target with the teacher and plan something within the lesson that will address it. After the lesson evaluate its effectiveness on the learning of the class. This makes a traditional observation less intimidating and enables the teacher to be a part of the evaluation. This is empowering for the teacher and much more motivating.
Face to face when it is important that everyone receives personalised feedback. Try not to use judgemental language like good or bad but sentence starters such as 'I noticed that...', 'I found...interesting', 'Tell me about...'
Observing the learning is a successful way to watch the learning of particular groups of children. As subject lead, you teach the children and allow the class teacher to watch the children as they 'learn'. This enables the class teacher to find any problem areas for children. It allows the class teacher the time to observe what is working and what is not. At the end of the lesson, talk through what they have seen and make next steps for tackling the problem.
If school has a general issue then you could do a summary of findings with grows and glows. No one is named specifically in these so all staff can share in the glows and be part of helping with the grows. A general issues can also be addressed with additional CPD.
If you find that there is an inconsistency to something you have monitored, a hints and tips sheet is useful. No one is mentioned by name but you can take all the effective practice seen and create a kind of good practice factsheet. With inconsistencies, you could ask a member of staff to share good practice at the beginning of a staff meeting but this should be handled sensitively and time to shine moments shared around all colleagues for a range of good practices.
A display of facts, outcomes, comments from staff or children. This is great when you have children's speech bubbles about your subject or some inspirational data.
Standards files
During your first year as subject lead, you should start collecting examples of children's work from your book monitoring to create standards files. These are files with work that demonstrate a given level of disciplinary (skills) knowledge in your area of expertise. They are like progression grids but are unique to your school and your students. I would start in your first year asking for clear and obvious examples of children's work that show the Expected standard in that year group in each unit of work. For example, as History lead I would be asking my colleagues to provide one piece of Expected work for chronology, enquiry, research, language and presentation within each unit of study. You can then show progression across the year group and as the years develop.
The following year you can ask for another Expected piece but also a Working Towards and Greater Depth piece of work. Build your standards files so they demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the quality of the standards within your school.. You could annotate some of the Expected pieces to be explicit about what they need to contain to be awarded Expected. This is a great resource for staff to use to support assessments but also for you to use for external scrutiny.
Engaging learners
All subjects need to consider their ability to engage learners, whether this is through ICT, role play, themed days, visitors and trips out. Think of ICT as a way of consolidating key skills, role play and themed days as preparation for a following task, themed days, visitors and trips to inspire and engage excitement for a short period of time in a topic. Together they should support retention of knowledge and skills within a subject.
Consolidating skills with ICT can include game based apps where students can compete against friends and other schools, quizzes to check on learning outside the lesson or research based internet searches.
Role play and themed days can be used as a fun way to gain experience, empathy or research about a topic.
Themed days, visitors and trips can fire children's enthusiasm for a topic, not only on the day but for the short term afterwards.
Good to Outstanding
There is no template for Outstanding subject leadership. Just as 2 completely different schools can be Outstanding so can 2 completely different subject leads. But there are some themes that may help you in achieving outstanding:
1. The rigour of implementing the monitoring and evaluation triangulation each term. If it has been a slow term or your school are prioritising other subjects, ensure you still have some evidence for each area for each of your Action Plan targets. You can always take photos of books after school or send catch-up emails to staff if you need feedback on a certain issue. It may be that some elements are missing even after you do all this but always try to complete the triangle for all targets.
2. The quality of results you produce from the monitoring and what you do with it. Collecting the data is all well and good but have you really looked at it? Have you used it to analyse groups of children and year group performance? What are the results telling you? What are you going to do about the issues that you find?
3. Have you shared your findings about your subject area with staff? It may be that you are leading a meeting about your subject in a couple of weeks and will share good practice and support staff with areas for development then. If this is not the case, then you need to ensure that your feedback systems are working properly. See a full list of feedback options earlier on this page and establish good habits of collaborative working and effective feedback.