This document discusses organizing curriculum to personalize learning for students. It provides a "big picture" framework with three key questions: 1) What are you trying to achieve for learners? 2) How can you best organize learning to achieve aims? 3) How will you know when you are achieving aims? Activities guide schools to reflect on how they currently organize learning and ways to make it more flexible and tailored to individual students' needs.

1. If the curriculum is to be inspiring and challenging
for all learners, preparing them well for the 21st century,
it has to be dynamic, responsive to change, relevant
and engaging.
To help schools reflect on their curriculum, QCA has
developed a curriculum ‘big picture’ that illustrates
the idea of the curriculum as the entire planned
learning experience. This includes the lessons that
learners have during the school day, but also
recognises how much young people learn from
routines, events, the extended school day and
activities that take place out of school.
The big picture, like the activities in this pack, is
organised around three key questions:
• What are you trying to achieve for your learners
through the curriculum?
• How can you best organise learning to enable you to
achieve your aims for learners?
• How will you know when you are achieving your aims?
This and all other activities with a green band at the
top relate to the second of the questions above.
HOW will you organise learning?A
CTI VIT
Y
Personalising the curriculum
1
TALKING POINT: How does the big
picture relate to your school?
Take a look at the curriculum big picture
with colleagues (resource A). What does
the word ‘curriculum’ mean to you as a school?
Do you think of the national curriculum? The
subject programmes of study? A set of content to
cover? Or do you see the entire learning
experience, as described in the big picture?
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© Qualifications and Curriculum Authority

2. PRACTICAL ACTION: Moving towards greater
personalisation
There are many aspects of the curriculum about
which you can make choices that help you move
towards a more personalised, tailored curriculum
for your learners.
Take seven sheets of A3 paper and write headings
for a different aspect of the curriculum at the top of
each, for example time, staff, space for learning,
involving learners in curriculum decisions, teaching
approaches, learning activities, and assessment.
Then, as shown in the example below, work with
colleagues to write two descriptions for each
aspect: what happens when it is used rigidly, and
what happens when it is used flexibly. Write these
at either end of the line showing the move
towards a more personalised curriculum.
Where are you now on this continuum? Where
would you need to be to really meet the needs of
your learners? What could you do to move there?
Example: Using time
Time for learning is
rigidly dictated by
the timetable
Time is used flexibly,
informed by the nature
of learning need
towards a more personalised curriculum
TALKING POINT: How do you organise
learning?
Discuss the middle section of the big
picture (how learning can be organised) with
colleagues.
• To what extent does coverage of subjects
dominate curriculum planning in your school?
• How could other components of the curriculum
have a greater influence?
• How flexible are you in the way you organise
learning? How well do you personalise the
curriculum to meet the needs of your learners?
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