End points
Starting with the end in mind is not enough. Nor is setting out skills, knowledge and vocab. The job's not done unless assessment is built in too.
Welcome to the Curriculum Thinkers newsletter where we share research and resources from the We Are In Beta community to help you get the best outcomes for your students.
This is a guest post by Curriculum expert and former Vice Principal, Aidan Severs. If you’d like to write for us, head to the bottom of this post.
Whether we’re teaching a single lesson, a sequence or an entire curriculum, there’s only one way for us to begin: let’s start at the very beginning - a very good place to start. Isn’t it?
Or did Julie Andrews get it wrong? Well, when it comes to planning for teaching and learning, she wasn’t even in the ballpark.
No, to get your planning right, it’s all about starting with the end, which is easier said than done. It’s far simpler to choose a few engaging activities and go from there, and, actually, it’s really difficult to write learning goals that have real clarity.
No-one really wants to start by thinking about what the pupils will have to be assessed on and, starting with the end sounds… kinda… time-consuming, and who on earth has time to consume in this game?
The article you’re reading is the beginning of our new series: Curriculum and Teaching Techniques.
Over the coming weeks, we’re going to take a look at some key aspects of curriculum planning and some important classroom teaching techniques. Things like designing resources effectively, teaching subject-specific vocabulary and adaptive teaching are all on the menu: there’s some tasty stuff coming your way.
We’ll examine some good practice from members of the Curriculum Thinkers community and think about how you might be able to apply some of the key principles in your school.
This particular article will lead us on to think more about curriculum sequencing, developing teacher subject knowledge and designing effective resources.
And, although we don’t do things for Ofsted, it is useful to have a common language surrounding these things - that’s how we find support and learn from each other.
So, with the current framework toolkit asking inspectors to look for teaching that causes pupils to “work towards clearly defined end points” it is well worth diving into what some of our community members have been doing in this regard.
Before we reveal how Curriculum Thinkers Members define end points, quick announcement…
🗳️ Closing soon: last week to nominate colleagues you admire and/or submit session proposals for Curriculum Thinking 2026
Curriculum Thinking Week is an amazing opportunity to share and get feedback on your work.
Here’s what lead Practitioner , Katherine Baulcomb said about her experience speaking last year:
Thanks, Katherine!
If you are interested in nominating colleagues and/or submitting session proposals for our Curriculum Thinking Week 2026 here are some key dates:
By 8th June - tell us you’d like to speak in this short form
By 22nd June - share an outline of your session in this form
By 26th June – create and upload your video, supported by your SLT
w/c 6th July – conference goes live! Jump in to meet fellow speakers, discuss sessions and learn from a wealth of ideas and resources on offer.
Backwards design - defining end points at the start
One such member is Lewis Glaze - a curriculum leader at John Taylor Free School. Lewis is doing excellent work in his department using the concept of backwards design. The great thing is, it doesn’t matter what subject you teach or lead, his insights are completely relevant to everyone; as we look at some of the key points from his practice, you can be thinking: “How would this work for me and my subject?”
Before Lewis set out on his journey of backwards planning enlightenment, he admits that he was “plucking obscure units of work in fits of desperation” and projecting them “unadulterated onto the whiteboard… and everything was a sheet because sheets mean the kids are doing something.”
So, how did he go from that, to clearly-mapped schemes of work, students who are able to recall KS3 knowledge as a foundation to KS4 lessons, increased departmental outcomes in KS3 and KS4 and uptake at GCSE developing year on year (not to mention great feedback from cross-trust QA and Ofsted)?
“Leaders have developed a curriculum that is ambitious, broad and balanced. They
have identified what pupils should learn in different subjects and have sequenced it
logically.”
1. 🎯 Start with the finish line - decide what Y9 looks like, then plan Y7–9 backwards
Asking the question ‘Where do I want them to get to?’ and then working with a team of people (Lewis says that’s crucial) is key to eventually being able to identify the defined end points. It might be easy enough to fill lessons with content, but if you don’t know what pupils should know by the end of all the lessons, you’ll never know if the individual content of each lesson will get them anywhere useful. Far better to do the hard graft of really defining what you want by the end and then mapping the journey.
2. 🧭 Map the journey - set out the knowledge, skills and vocab each year with clear waypoints
If you know what you want pupils to achieve by, say, year 9, you can work out all the steps they will need to take on their journey to that goal. Then you can work out which steps need to be taken at what time - we’ll look into sequencing more in the next article in this series, but for now we’re thinking about breaking things down into year groups, and some key points within those year groups (often terms, especially if your subject is on rotation with others). And when I say steps, I mean identifying exactly which pieces of knowledge you want pupils to know by heart, precisely which skills you want them to be able to exercise, as well as a defined list of key vocabulary that will help pupils to understand, think about and talk about the subject and their own work.
Lewis and his colleagues ended up with a simple yet crystal-clear map of exactly what should be taught in KS3 and when it should be taught. You can see this document in the Curriculum Thinkers community, here.
Would someone else find this useful?
3. 📊 Check as you go - agree success criteria and use quick, low-stakes checks that mirror the end goal
There are two added benefits of taking the time to identify these steps:
You end up with ready-made assessment criteria
You begin to see how the content should be taught
By answering the question ‘How will I know when they’re there?’ you are inadvertently creating a success criteria and a set of statements that can be flipped into assessment questions and assessment criteria.
The answer to the ‘How will I know when they’re there?’ question will begin something like this: ‘I will know when they are there when they can…’. The list of things that pupils should be able to do at that end point then becomes the list of things you are looking for when you assess them. Then, like Lewis and his team did, you can begin to break this down into different degrees of success in order to help you pinpoint the extent to which a pupil has achieved the desired end points:
By asking ‘How can I best get them there?’ you’re switching your thinking from ‘What can I get them to do in this lesson’ and starting to think about how to best use lesson time to help pupils reach the goals you’ve set. And that’s where the real purposeful teaching and learning happens.
Without the clarity of a clearly-defined end point in mind, teachers can get bogged down in lots of extra stuff that doesn’t really matter. But when they know without a doubt that they will be assessing a pupil on their knowledge of particular content at the end of a unit of work, they can teach with laser focus. When you plan and teach in this backwards manner, you end up moving your pupils much further forwards.
Need someone to review your curriculum? Or support your teaching teams to improve end points?
Interested in paid projects supporting schools to improve curriculum and teaching?
Join our team of associates here.
Defining the end points in your subject
With just three simple questions (Where do I want them to get to? How will I know when they’re there? How can I best help them get there?), and the time to work alongside colleagues, you could transform the way you plan and teach your subject’s curriculum. Check out Lewis’ practice for more of the inspiration behind his work and the outcomes of his backwards planning revelation.
Your pupils should be on a journey, and when you’ve defined clear end points, you’ll know where that journey is headed. Once you have those end points, and as you work backwards to assign small steps of content to specific year groups, you’ll need to get to grips with curriculum sequencing.
So, how can you use the idea of backwards planning in your subject?
Plan some time to get together with your colleagues to do some backwards planning (share this article with them beforehand)
Discuss together what you want for year 9 pupils as they cross the KS3 finishing line and begin their GCSEs (you could do this for any end point - the end of year 7, the end of year 11, for example)
Decide on your absolute must-haves for the end point, and take the time to work out the exact wording - wording which helps teachers to teach precisely
Remember that this kind of work takes time and collaboration - you may need to allocate tasks for individual team members to complete before coming back together to share what has been done. The mapping of objectives and development of assessment criteria will require further meetings and gap tasks!
In the next article in this series, we’ll take a look at ensuring that the knowledge and skills you teach actually build on what has been taught before - because once you know the destination, the real challenge is deciding the order of the journey.
Sent this by a friend?
Further reading and resources
Premium members get more. Much more.
Teaching and Learning (T&L) policies: full analysis, resource bank and case studies.
How to identify the highest leverage step in curriculum development
Premium members can:
Learn how other achieve academic success through hundreds of videos and resources on demand
Access thousands of policies from successful schools analysed by us
Promote unlimited jobs in our newsletters that go out to 23k every fortnight
Ask the We Are In Beta team to do pretty much anything (within reason!) to push you forward - find resources, do research, make introductions, crunch data, etc.
Not a member? Get a trial here
How High Expectations, Strong Relationships, and Precision Support Drive Outstanding Outcomes - Copleston High School
How do you ensure the students that face largest barriers and will get the most from your support access and engage in it? And how do you fund it?
Join Andy Green (Executive Headteacher) from Copleston High School to learn…
How the Copleston “Nine Pillars” contribute to the “Power of the System” as an interconnected framework to deliver highest standards across curriculum, teaching, pastoral and personal development.
How consistency creates fairness and frees up the mind.
How to create a predictable and fair environment for students to free up cognitive load.
📆 Thurs June 11th 2026
🕓 4.15pm
Opportunities to get involved with We Are In Beta
Write for us
If you like to earn while you learn (about all things curriculum leadership and subject specific), you should think about writing for We Are In Beta.
Not only do you get free access to hundreds of videos and thousands of resources, you also get to learn from oodles of inspiring curriculum leaders and subject specialists from across the country. The team of writers is ace too: Matthew Wood Philip Usher Laura Fox Louise Ferrier Justin Arnold Aidan Severs to name a few .
DM Niall Alcock if you’d like to know more.
Help your fellow curriculum and subject specialists: share your work
If you’re working on something that you’d like to share and get feedback on, submit an application to join the lineup for Curriculum Thinking Week 2026.
It’s a great way to crystallise your thinking, make an impact beyond your classroom and build your CV. Ofsted’s not why we do what we do, but the new Ofsted toolkit encourages schools to share practice:
“Leaders use their exceptional success in this evaluation area to support improvement across all aspects of their own school and/or group, and share their learning and best practice externally to support system-wide improvement, for example with other schools, professionals, their community and stakeholders, including local and/or national networks.”
The work you share might end up getting featured in this newsletter, and not to mention really help others working on similar problems.
Message Kasia Borowczak if you have any questions.
Join our team of school improvement associates
If you have a track record of transforming academic outcomes across MATs and/or in schools and you want to increase the impact you have by supporting others via paid school improvement projects, register your interest in joining our team of associates
👉Register your interest in joining our team of school improvement associates.
Need specialist school improvement support?
Whether your team is stretched too thin, they don’t have a particular skill set covered or don’t yet have tangible experience driving improvement in certain areas, we can help you find experts with a track record of impact, who can help you with short to medium term improvement objectives.
👉Tell us your school improvement needs here
(then we’ll get in touch to discuss next steps)
Sent with ❤️ from the Curriculum Thinkers Team at We Are In Beta