By Lewis Hollings, deputy head teacher of Christ Church Primary Hampstead and project lead
Between September 2024 and July 2025, Christ Church Primary in Hampstead was delighted to lead a borough-wide initiative designed to mentor and develop new and emerging curriculum leaders across Camden’s primary schools.
Our recent Ofsted inspection had identified the strength of our curriculum leadership, in terms of its depth, coherence and expertise. This recognition from inspectors made us realise that we were well placed to offer meaningful school-to-school support on the primary curriculum and we wanted to share best practice. It was, therefore, a great privilege to work on the Curriculum Leadership Mentoring Initiative, in close partnership with Gospel Oak Primary, Christ Church NW1 and Primrose Hill Primary.
While Camden Learning’s curriculum leader network has long offered valuable opportunities for school collaboration, we were aware of a gap in personalised, practice-based support for those stepping into curriculum leadership for the first time and the Curriculum Leadership Mentoring Initiative sought to bridge that gap.
“Being guided by such an expert was incredibly helpful. Her confidence, patience and knowledge were second to none.”
We set about developing knowledgeable curriculum leaders who could positively influence teaching and learning and long-term pupil outcomes in their own settings. Our goals and intentions were:
- To build the confidence, skills and subject knowledge of new and recently appointed curriculum leaders
- To provide individual mentoring, focusing on both leadership tasks and subject-specific development
- To offer support that was practical, non-judgemental and responsive to each school’s curriculum priorities
- To improve provision for pupils through stronger curriculum leadership
Each mentoring relationship began with an initial meeting to identify priorities, followed by a jointly agreed action plan built around three achievable tasks. These ranged from creating progression documents for vocabulary and for maths to slimming down the enquiries included in each year group for science.
Our curriculum leaders offered in-school visits, email support and sign-posting to networks throughout the year. Curriculum leaders valued the learning walks at Christ Church, enabling them to practise monitoring and feedback skills outside their own setting and reducing the perceived pressure of monitoring within one’s own school. The “non-threatening” and “non-judgemental” input of peer-to-peer advice was seen as particularly supportive.
“It was so nice to have the time to sit down and talk about music with someone who was interested and wanted to provide support!”
Feedback from participants reflected the strength and success of the programme. One colleague said: “Being guided by such an expert was incredibly helpful. Her confidence, patience and knowledge were second to none.” Another commented: “It was so nice to have the time to sit down and talk about music with someone who was interested and wanted to provide support!”
The initiative had a clear and positive impact, with curriculum leaders reporting significant gains in subject expertise, confidence in monitoring and the ability to lead change. But most importantly, it has had a really positive impact on the children themselves – participating schools said they were seeing better pupil engagement, clearer sequencing and stronger understanding across subject areas.
We’re incredibly proud of the impact that this initiative has had. It has strengthened curriculum leadership across Camden and has deepened professional collaboration between schools. As a school, we are passionate about championing high-quality curriculum leadership and look forward to continuing our work in this area in the years ahead.
Read the full initiative report here
