Ofsted’s new personal development judgement places emphasis on how your curriculum goes over and above the academic or technical. Kloodle offers a wide range of fantastic features, each designed to showcase how your curriculum does this and the impact it has on your learners. Here are ten steps for achieving this on Kloodle.
1. Set up your core skills / character traits / values
The personal development judgement focuses on how your curriculum is building the self-belief, resilience and character of your learners. The “research basis” for Ofsted’s framework states that one of the strongest interventions in this field is having a “whole school approach” to character development. This requires an agreed-upon set of values, traits and skills that permeates throughout your curriculum. Kloodle helps to reinforce these skills as, each time a learner uploads to their profile, they’ll tag in these skills, reinforcing their importance and reflecting how the learner is developing these skills as a direct result of your curriculum.
Here’s how to set up these skills
2. Set up curriculum areas
These skills are being developed through every area of your curriculum, from careers to chemistry, from enrichment to english. The next step to representing your personal development curriculum on Kloodle is to create curriculum areas. This enables you to then create awards for each of these areas. More on the importance of awards later.
Here’s how to set up curriculum areas on Kloodle
3. Set up learners and tags
Next, you’ll want to input all of your learners into Kloodle, along with their tags. Tags identify the groups a learner belongs to. For example, you might want to tag learners with their year group, tutor group or maths class. You can even add tags such as socio-economic background, gender etc.
Setting up tags enables you to report on different demographics of your school or college, showing the impact your personal development curriculum has had on specific groups of learners.
Here’s how to load learners into Kloodle along with tags
4. Set up awards for each of the personal development activities that are taking place across your curriculum
Personal development is not confined to PSHE. Learners will be building character in history as well as during enrichment. Creating awards for each of these instances serves two purposes: –
- It shows the breadth of personal development activities on offer (a main requirement for Ofsted’s personal development judgement)
- It enables you to gather learner reflections on each of these activities, instilling skill development and understanding
Every head of subject or department should be able to list a series of activities under their curriculum area that is building the skills you outlined in step 1. They can load these into Kloodle.
You can do this in one of two ways: –
- Mass upload of spreadsheet
- Creating each award individually
5. Use the Dashboard to manage gaps
Once you have begun to populate Kloodle with activities, you can identify gaps in your personal development curriculum and manage your provision. You can manage these in two main ways: –
- By curriculum area – e.g. you will be able to see that pastoral has 15 activities aiding personal development, whereas biology has none.
- By skill – you’ll also be able to see that your provision develops teamwork exceptionally well, but struggles to develop leadership
Here’s how you can use the Kloodle dashboard to manage your provision
6. Follow the lesson plans to help build the start of your learners’ Kloodle profiles
A learner’s profile will be their complete record of personal development. The first half of a profile is, essentially, like a CV. We have a series of lesson plans that you can deliver to help learners get up and running with building their profile. These will help you to: –
- Write a bio
- Build your achievements section
- Formulate your goals
- Audit skills
This data is a fantastic pastoral log for your learners and helps strengthen staff / learner relationships, a crucial part of the personal development judgement.
Here’s how to access the lesson plans
7. Record participation in each awards
You’ll now want to start to capture the activities learners are participating in which are helping with their personal development. For example, you might want to capture the number of people who have participated in the debating club. You can do this in one of two ways: –
- The student-led way
- The teacher-led way (link to follow)
Once you have started to do this, you then begin to get a clear picture of what activities learners are participating in. Ofsted highlight “feeling of belonging” as a major factor in boosting mental health. You can start to see just how much learners are involving themselves in your school community by using the participation table on Kloodle.
8. Begin to capture reflections on activities
Kloodle’s true strength lies in the capturing of reflections. This process is CRUCIAL in ensuring: –
- Learners are “making meaning” of each activity they participate in. This strengthens learning
- Learners are able to utilise the new knowledge and skills they are gaining through your personal development curriculum into different areas. Ofsted are big on this transferability of knowledge.
Gathering reflections on your activities is easy on Kloodle. Here’s how you can do it
9. Provide feedback on learning
Once you have started to get learners to engage with awards and upload their reflections, you can begin to provide feedback on their personal development.
10. Measure and improve
Kloodle provides a dashboard to measure the impact of your personal development curriculum. This includes aspects such as: –
- The skills your learners are developing
- The hours of activities such as work experience, volunteering and paid employment
- The areas where learners are participating
Added Bonus
Ofsted also mentions that the quality of debate is an important factor in personal development. You can record this debate using Kloodle’s network feature. To learn how to do this, follow this link (link to follow).
