Convent of Jesus and Mary School

The Quality Mark has been a really important part in the journey of the development of our history curriculum culture at the Convent of Jesus and Mary. Our school is a diverse comprehensive all-girls Catholic school situated in Harlesden, north west London. We first started working together as a department team in 2016, and ambitiously decided to transform the curriculum. We mapped out key guiding principles that would ground our curriculum: diverse histories, criticality and academic excellence. We wanted to create a bespoke history curriculum which resonated with our students, gave them a global perspective of the past and improved their academic performance. This was a huge undertaking, but a new transformed curriculum emerged. This was a difficult process which took years to create and while we were proud of what we had developed, we needed to evaluate our new curriculum culture. Critical reflection is a key part of teacher professionalism, however there are not many opportunities to engage in such critical exercises as an history department team in a meaningful and productive process...