MAT / Curriculum leads: are you looking to share your curriculum. Here are four pitfalls to avoid, to make it work for your team, avoid risk and maybe even help your budget!
My Four Publishing Pitfalls
1 – Reputational damage
2 – Quality failings
3 – Maintenance and management overload
4 – Distraction from teaching and learning
Over my 20 year career in educational publishing, I’ve reviewed, advised on and produced adaptations of thousands of hours of curriculum resources – including those of government agencies, expert teachers, and leading Multi Academy Trusts.
However, the expertise to publish those resources has, traditionally, sat within big publishing houses. Since the pandemic, the model of Oak National, and with the rise of AI and other digital tools; this monopoly is breaking down. It’s never been easier to access the expertise to share your work with the world but it’s not without risks. But before we get to those – why might you be doing this?
OK – so your team has worked hard to make your curriculum work and you’ve evidence of impact for your community. Other school leaders have asked for you to share the resources and asked about professional development. You are clearly getting something right!
- Perhaps it delivers on your values around environmental issues – specifically, responding to the climate emergency as global citizens.
- Perhaps you’ve created a way to bring diversity and representation into the learning in your community in a meaningful way.
- Perhaps you’ve found a way to evolve the knowledge rich and cognitive science agenda to make meaningful steps forward.
- Perhaps you have found a way to tackle the recruitment and retention of high quality staff through innovation in pedagogy, delivery and topic choice.
You’d like to publish it on a website or platform, and invite other MATs / Schools to use what you’ve created. Maybe it’s for the kudos, maybe it’s to help with recruitment, maybe it’s for extra income, maybe it’s to give something back to the wider system and profession. Maybe it’s something else or a combination of things. Whatever your driver, you’ll want to do a good job.
Whether you seek to charge for the Professional Development and Curriculum Resources your staff have created, or make it available for free; as soon as it ‘goes live’ beyond your organisation, you’ll need to professionalise your offer. While you have a team who can help to do a lot of this work, you know it’s not going to be easy
Pitfall 1 – Reputational damage
There are different types of risk on reputation – which are not hard to resolve in themselves – but can cause issues for staff, pupils, community, and even the organisation itself.
- Content Errors – Whether it’s getting a date wrong, using the wrong exam specification, or mislabelling a diagram – these simple mistakes can be deeply embarrassing and undermine the trust in your expertise.
- Relevance and Representation – While the content of your curriculum might seem to work in your setting(s) have you considered the wider implications of (for example) not featuring enough female scientists in your references – both from fair challenge on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion from peers – but also the young people using your materials, and calling you out on it on social media?
- Legal and Compliance – It’s all too common for teachers to use an image, quote or graph from a source without checking the copyright first. That is fine within a school – but as soon as it is ‘distributed’ – the organisation can very quickly be exposed to highly litigious rights-holders. Also, #GDPR rules and data kept for the normal running of a school is different from that retained and managed for users of a service.
Pitfall 2 – Quality failings
Quality can cover a large number of issues and, if you have ever downloaded a resource you’ll recognise some of these: images that don’t print properly, boxes that are not big enough for children to write in, fonts that are not accessible, inconsistencies in style and features, a lack of editability, webpages that don’t link or load on mobile devices.
These common problems can be managed through expertise from Editors : Designers : User Experience/eLearning designers : Accessibility champions, and content producers.
Pitfall 3 – Maintenance and management overload
This is something I’ve seen from far too many organisations, including museums and galleries, as well as commercial edtech outfits, and schools. It’s not just a matter of putting the content out there and stepping away. Once you offer it as a product or service – you have a responsibility to your users (whether they pay money or not) to maintain and manage it.
This means planning your resources, systems and processes, and managing / communication expectations with your audience. It could be as easy as publishing everything under a #creativecommons licence and stepping away to allow a thousand blossoms to bloom, or a fully managed service, with customer service and support teams as well as regular updates to the content.
Looking ahead to decide how to navigate these questions is something too many organisations fail to do; worried more about whether the content will be good enough, rather than having the confidence to plan for others to want to keep on using it.
Pitfall 4 – Distraction from teaching and learning
Perhaps the worst for any MAT leader to fall into, it’s also the hardest to avoid. Publishing content and offering a service to schools is not ‘rocket science’ and it can look like something that existing teams and experts within your organisation can do on top of their school leadership roles. At the risk of stating the obvious, this is often a huge mistake.
Staff, who have likely spent months, if not years, creating this curriculum, will feel deeply invested and want to see it thrive elsewhere. They might even offer to do loads of work to make it ready for publishing. Apart from maintaining the coherence and integrity of the approach – there might also be real value in harnessing this expertise to help other schools, by linking it to a Professional Development offer.
However, taking teachers and leaders away from their core purpose has a cost to your operation. During the pandemic lockdowns, many MATs and curriculum leaders rushed to share their exceptional content and – while this generosity can only be applauded – it often had a negative impact on their colleagues and the work with their setting.
There are professionals adept and experienced in this work – better placed to support you to get this work done, without damaging the core work of your school. There are people ready to bring timely and appropriate expertise to help you achieve your goals.
There might be partners who’d be ideal to work with; such as technology providers, third sector or art/culture organisations, or research grouping. Again, establishing and managing these relationships takes time and resources.
Staying out of the pits
The good new is there are people who can guide you over and around these four pitfalls. If you are looking for a guide, get in touch.
If you’ve been on this journey, or you have reflections or additions to this list (which isn’t even attempting to be exhaustive!) it would be great if you could comment here – so others can learn. I’d also appreciate your feedback.
You can arrange a quick chat here or comment below. Thanks