A successful conference!

Ark Curriculum Plus Annual Conference

Own your curriculum

29-30 March 2022

This week we hosted our second annual conference bringing together schools that use our English and Mathematics Mastery programmes. We believe the conference was a success and it seems the delegates agree:

"So thought provoking! Really glad I attended!!!"

The most beneficial part of the conference was "Hearing from leaders with direct experience of transforming Trusts and teachers and middle leaders with direct experience of English Mastery in the classroom."

Conference feedback form respondents

The conference took place virtually over Tuesday and Wednesday afternoon with the theme ‘Own your curriculum’. Our aim was to empower teachers and school leaders to take ownership of their Mastery programme, with teachers using the resources fluently to ensure every student in their school receives a broad, balanced and ambitious curriculum.

We were particularly pleased this year to be able to put the spotlight on schools who are achieving outstanding quality of education, so that we could ensure our schools get the full benefit of being part of a diverse network.

"Once you are Mastery teacher, you are part of a huge network of expertise that you can always reach out to."

Narayan Deb, Kingsley Academy | Principal’s perspective leadership session

"Listening to the comparative experiences that have been had gave me lots to think about and I feel much more prepared for any potential Maths deep dive than I did before."

"Great to hear the real life experiences of the two schools and consider the similarities/differences."

Conference feedback form respondents

Keynote speeches were given by Steve Rollett, Confederation of School Trusts and Becky Allen, Teacher Tapp. Both speeches left delegates and us with lots to think about moving forward with curriculum resilience and making the classroom more diverse.

"So thought-provoking, a really useful crystallisation of what makes the system complex and how to navigate that landscape."

We also had sessions running that were subject and phase specific. Highlights from these strands include: 

Leadership: pan-programme content selected to be of particular interest to school and trust leaders

• Successful implementation: How to deliver and sustain a resourced curriculum - Professor Jonathan Sharples, Education Endowment Foundation
• Sessions ran on the perspectives of:
  • Principals
  • MAT Leads
  • Network Leads

Maths Mastery Primary 

• The EYFS reforms: Building a maths curriculum that is more than rote, retrieval and recall - Elaine Bennett, Keeping Early Years Unique
  
• Curriculum implementation: Messages from Ofsted’s research review - Hannah Stoten, Ofsted

"Great to hear 'from the horse's mouth' what Ofsted are looking for and focus on!"

Maths Mastery Secondary 

• Creating a mathematics curriculum for mixed-attainment classrooms - Mike Ollerton, Association of Teachers of Mathematics
• Care in mathematics education - Anne Watson, University of Oxford

"I thoroughly enjoyed Anne's talk, very fascinating indeed!"

English Mastery Secondary 

• Mastering the fundamentals of reading and writing - Alex Quigley, Education Endowment Foundation
• Exploring constructions of quality in the curriculum in English - Sarah Hubbard, Ofsted

ACP Conference agenda 2022

We are delighted to share recordings of all sessions with our partner schools, on our digital learning platform MyMastery. We look forward to running more events to enable learning and collaboration between schools in our network.