Ofsted Inspectors' Questions and Curriculum Progression in MFL

 So this week's big story was the leaking of Ofsted Inspectors' Question Crib Sheets, on the website Quality Schools. The MFL one doesn't really hold any surprises - it's based on asking how you ensure progression in the three "Pillars" of Phonics, Grammar and High Frequency Vocabulary.

There's one section that has got me wondering. There's a section of questions for Inspectors to ask staff to see if they are on top of exactly how and when certain features are taught:

Now we know that the curriculum envisaged by Ofsted and NCELP and the new GCSE is a curriculum based NOT on growing the learners' language - their evolving conceptualisations, repertoire, and ability to use the language to interact with meaning and to express themselves. Instead it is a curriculum that takes the linguist's language and chops it up and tries to reconstitute it. (As in Scott Thornbury's metaphorical rubbery omelette analogy.)

The thing is, I have it very clear in our curriculum how we take the raw ingredients and carefully let them cook into the learners' language. What I don't know is where Ofsted get their idea of what the lumps of chopped up cold omelette should be. The quoted question above shows some random spot check items: agreement, word order, comparatives, superlatives.

If you ask me when we teach comparatives do I have an answer ready? Isn't it literally just the word "más"? What else are they expecting me to have planned? How have I organised the curriculum to accommodate radical changing verbs, impersonal expressions, adjectives before a vowel like nouvel, verbs where the spelling follows the sound like mangeons? These are hardly the architectural pillars of a curriculum. And it's starting to sound like a tick box curriculum on paper. Not something robust that builds what you want pupils to know or be able to do.

And I know it's just a spot check random example, but it seems adjective heavy. And in our curriculum we're not big on adjectives. You can't spend 5 years on "it is..." And one thing the current GCSE doesn't ask for is description. I don't ask, Décris ta chambre... Comment est ta soeur... Because the criteria want rather more than is + adjective. Even if you can say Elle est plus intelligente que moi.

Is there a list of things that the language curriculum has to be made up of? The NCELP curriculum isn't compulsory. The GCSE syllabus isn't supposed to determine KS3. The 2016 Review had idiosyncratic things to say about verb paradigms. What is it that Ofsted are actually meant to be inspecting? It's whether we are teaching the National Curriculum. Which sets out what we are meant to be teaching. Spoiler alert. It does not mention the comparative or the superlative.

It's worth going back and looking at the National Curriculum to remind yourself (and Ofsted if need be) what it is we are supposed to be teaching. Here's the central points:

It should enable pupils to understand and communicate personal and factual information that goes beyond their immediate needs and interests, developing and justifying points of view in speech and writing, with increased spontaneity, independence and accuracy... Write prose using an increasingly wide range of grammar and vocabulary, write creatively to express their own ideas and opinions, and translate short written text accurately into the foreign language.

I'm glad I checked. Because that is exactly what we do. I am not going to lose sleep over whether a member of the department may or may not be able to answer the question, "When do you teach the superlative?" Because I will already have told the Ofsted inspector that we follow the National Curriculum and develop what pupils can do with the language, with increasing spontaneity, independence and accuracy in order to understand and communicate, developing and justifying points of view.

So if I didn't start with the linguist's map of the whole language and chop it up like a dead omelette, how have I structured our curriculum progression?

By what pupils can do with the language. And how well they can do it in terms of expression, independence, spontaneity, coherence and sophistication. That's our curriculum progression model.

These are the exemplars for our Key Performance Indicators for Year 8 and Year 9. They are based around pupils developing and being able to deploy their repertoire across topics. So everything builds up, and nothing is left behind. By the end, they can give and justify opinions, talk about other people, give examples in past and future and narrate anecdotes.

The second half of the KPI sheet shows the other half of the progression model. Not what they are learning but how well they can deploy it. With increasing expression, coherence, accuracy and spontaneity. Here is the Year 8 model:

So I have kept this overall vision of progression which seems eminently compatible with the National Curriculum. With pupils learning to speak and write and express themselves in French. And I have rewritten the booklets to make all the grammar, phonics and non-topic vocabulary more explicit. Because we do teach word order, adjectival agreement, irregular adjectives, the words more  and most, infinitives, tenses, possessives. And we teach them in a way that ensures they become integrated with the body of language the pupil is accumulating and can deploy. Far from being incompatible with teaching the nuts and bolts of the language, a curriculum which expects pupils to communicate using the language REQUIRES them to be acquiring an understanding of how the language works. In order to express themselves.

And what if an inspector asks a pupil about their learning. Is it terrible if the pupil says, "I'm learning to talk about my free time"? Instead of saying, "I am learning to use verb + infinitive constructions to give and justify opinions"? Surely we want pupils to feel they are learning to communicate. And that this is what drives their learning and their progress. The planned curriculum can show how learning to talk about free time is bringing in tenses, adjectives, comparatives, superlatives. And the teacher may want pupils as part of the learning process to start to think about what is the most powerful and transferable language. But isn't it entirely natural for the learner to be focused on meaning, expression and what they can do in the language?