Subject Leadership Resources

New to leading a subject in a school or setting and unsure where to start when monitoring? This pack walks you through how to rapidly gather information about your subject so you can plan to make relevant changes and improvements. Designed to be time-efficient and work around your classroom commitments, this pack supports busy subject leaders who have no current insight about their subject to quickly get a handle on it.

This Curriculum Intent, Implementation and Impact Statement Checklist is ideal for any curriculum or subject leader who's looking to either write a curriculum statement from scratch or review and refine their existing statement.

It walks you through the stages of intent, implementation and impact, and offers helpful suggestions about what to include for each section, such as:

• Curriculum Intent - subject vision and purpose, curriculum goals, cultural capital, key themes and concepts, and curriculum sequencing
• Curriculum Implementation - curriculum design, teaching and learning strategies, resourcing, professional development, feedback and adaptive teaching
• Curriculum Impact - pupil outcomes, assessment data, pupil engagement, community and parent involvement, and whole-school impact

Sometimes called a "three I's" statement, your curriculum intent, implementation and impact statement is a vital document to have, as it supports teachers and leaders to understand how your subject is taught. It is also a key document to have on your school website as it can be viewed by external parties, such as prospective parents or Ofsted, to understand how your subject is taught. 

So if it's been a while since you looked at your statement, or if you don't have one in place at all, this editable checklist is ideal to save you time and energy when wondering what to include in a curriculum impact, implementation and impact statement, allowing you to get going straight away on writing or revamping yours.

A curriculum intent, implementation and impact statement also plays a key role for subject leaders in deeply understanding the rationale for their subject and is a key component of any subject leader folder. For further support with creating, building and organising an effective subject leader folder, this template along with many more are also included in our Subject Leader Folder Pack.

🔒 Fully aligned to the Ofsted School Inspection Toolkit 2025

This subject leader self-evaluation template helps curriculum and subject leaders evaluate their subject's strengths and development areas and are fully aligned with the 2025 Ofsted School Inspection Toolkit.

You'll get:

☑️ Structured self-evaluation criteria across all Ofsted toolkit strands (Safeguarding, Inclusion, Curriculum and Teaching, Achievement, Attendance and Behaviour, Personal Development and Well-being, plus optional Early Years and Post-16 sections), with Curriculum and Teaching broken down in detail for subject leadership including Intent, Implementation and Impact

☑️ Reflective questions and guidance on evidence sources in each section to support critical, evidence-based evaluation of your subject provision

☑️ Ofsted Grade Descriptor Grids fully aligned to the 2025 toolkit to inform your self-evaluation decisions

The template is fully editable so you can adapt it for your subject and school context.

Who should use this template?

This is essential for subject leaders, curriculum coordinators, phase leaders and middle leaders responsible for evaluating provision in their subject area. It's particularly valuable for new subject leads building their evaluation skills, or experienced leaders refining their SEF process. Headteachers and SLT can also use it to support consistency across subject leadership teams.

New to leading a subject in a school or setting and unsure where to start? This pack walks you through how to rapidly gather information about teacher subject knowledge so you can plan to make relevant changes and improvements. Designed to be time-efficient and work around your classroom commitments, this pack supports busy subject leaders who want to quickly assess, enhance or improve teacher subject knowledge in their setting.

Struggling to get release time to monitor History or having to complete subject monitoring in your PPA? This Ten-Minute Subject Monitoring in History Pack provides a solution to the challenges of having a high level of accountability as a primary subject leader but not having the time to complete the monitoring activities necessary - often because of factors beyond your control, such as the school budget, booking supply or getting cover.

Ten-minute subject monitoring works by identifying different time slots where you can be away from your teaching commitments in order to conduct a precise and focused subject monitoring activity on one element, such as a book look focusing on one strand of the History curriculum or a single 10-minute lesson drop-in. So rather than trying to find a full afternoon's cover to conduct a term or half-term's worth of monitoring, you can spread monitoring across a term by choosing slots where teaching and learning in your own classroom won't be impacted.

Aimed at primary History subject leads (or those line managing a History subject leader), this pack walks you through the entire process and is full of ideas on how to find and utilise ten-minute time slots for subject monitoring, as well as what you should be looking for in your monitoring when it comes to substantive knowledge and concepts, disciplinary knowledge and concepts, plus the chronological knowledge and historical terms and phenomena pupils need to grasp.

Want to know what's inside the pack? View a preview version of the guidance and accompanying template to get a deeper understanding of how ten-minute subject monitoring can help you!

This Subject Cultural Capital, Personal Development and Enrichment Audit is ideal for any subject leader who's looking to explore how their subject develops their pupils' personal qualities, offers enriching and broad educational experiences and promotes equality, diversity and fundamental British Values. For schools that have early years children, there's an EYFS version of this audit also included in the bundle.

The audit walks you through different reflective questions about your subject, allowing you to identify your current strengths and make a plan for any areas of development. The following types of questions are included - why not see if you can answer them about your subject?

• What opportunities do we offer through extracurricular [subject] clubs and activities? How do we ensure all pupils can access these?
• What opportunities are there within the local community to provide rich cultural experiences for our pupils in [subject]?
  
• Are pupils given the opportunity to make their own decisions in [subject], for example, with independent activities, free-choice time, clubs, book choices?

Questions like these can help you critically reflect on your subject in order to makes changes to give your pupils the best possible experiences as well as celebrating your successes in enriching your pupils' lives. Aligned with the Ofsted School Inspection Handbook, it'll help you to show how pupils get the best opportunities in the subject you lead (and if you're a curriculum leader, we've got a Personal Development Audit that covers the entire curriculum too!)

Understanding your subject's impact on pupils' cultural capital and personal development is a key component of subject leadership, and is something you may wish to evidence in a subject leader file. For further support with creating, building and organising an effective subject leader folder, this template along with many more are also included in our Subject Leader Folder Pack.

Struggling to get release time to monitor Music or having to complete subject monitoring in your PPA? This Ten-Minute Subject Monitoring in Music Pack provides a solution to the challenges of having a high level of accountability as a primary subject leader but not having the time to complete the monitoring activities necessary - often because of factors beyond your control, such as the school budget, booking supply or getting cover.

Ten-minute subject monitoring works by identifying different time slots where you can be away from your teaching commitments in order to conduct a precise and focused subject monitoring activity on one element, such as a work scrutiny focusing on one strand of the Music curriculum or a single 10-minute lesson drop-in. So rather than trying to find a full afternoon's cover to conduct a term or half-term's worth of monitoring, you can spread monitoring across a term by choosing slots where teaching and learning in your own classroom won't be impacted.

Aimed at primary Music subject leads (or those line managing a Music subject leader), this pack walks you through the entire process and is full of ideas on how to find and utilise ten-minute time slots for subject monitoring, as well as what you should be looking for in your monitoring when it comes to declarative knowledge, procedural knowledge and tacit knowledge, plus the three pillars of Music - technical, constructive and expressive skills.

Want to know what's inside the pack? View a preview version of the guidance and accompanying template to get a deeper understanding of how ten-minute subject monitoring can help you!

Struggling to get release time to monitor Geography or having to complete subject monitoring in your PPA? This Ten-Minute Subject Monitoring in Geography Pack provides a solution to the challenges of having a high level of accountability as a primary subject leader but not having the time to complete the monitoring activities necessary - often because of factors beyond your control, such as the school budget, booking supply or getting cover.

Ten-minute subject monitoring works by identifying different time slots where you can be away from your teaching commitments in order to conduct a precise and focused subject monitoring activity on one element, such as a book look focusing on one strand of the Geography curriculum or a single 10-minute lesson drop-in. So rather than trying to find a full afternoon's cover to conduct a term or half-term's worth of monitoring, you can spread monitoring across a term by choosing slots where teaching and learning in your own classroom won't be impacted.

Aimed at primary Geography subject leads (or those line managing a Geography subject leader), this pack walks you through the entire process and is full of ideas on how to find and utilise ten-minute time slots for subject monitoring. It also explores what you should be looking for in your monitoring when it comes to the four strands of substantive knowledge in Geography; locational knowledge, place knowledge, environmental, human and physical processes and geographical skills, as well as disciplinary knowledge in Geography.

Want to know what's inside the pack? View a preview version of the guidance and accompanying template to get a deeper understanding of how ten-minute subject monitoring can help you!