Curriculum development postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

For the past two years I have worked as a teaching assistant in an eleven-to-sixteen school, mostly supporting English and humanities lessons. The job has given me an unusual vantage point: I see the same scheme of work delivered by four different teachers to four different groups, and I notice which parts survive contact with a Year 8 class on a wet Thursday and which quietly get dropped. That gap between a written curriculum and an enacted one is what I want to study properly.

My interest began during my BA in English with Education Studies. For my dissertation I looked at the poetry and short fiction included in three widely used Key Stage 3 anthologies and compared their contents with the reading lists two local schools actually taught. I was expecting to find that teachers stuck closely to the anthology; in fact they selected a narrow core of texts and supplemented with material they had found themselves, often because a particular class had responded well to it. I interviewed four teachers about how they chose, and coded their reasons into categories such as manageable length, perceived relevance to pupils, and availability of ready-made questions. The last category came up more often than I had predicted, which made me think harder about how resource supply shapes curriculum content rather than the other way round. The project taught me to be careful with small samples: I could describe what these teachers said, but not generalise, and my conclusion had to be written accordingly.

Since then I have kept reading around the subject. Michael Young's argument that curriculum theory should concern itself with knowledge itself, not only with teaching methods, helped me articulate why I found some of my undergraduate work unsatisfying, and I have read enough of the debates that followed to know the position is contested rather than settled. I have also been reading about curriculum coherence and sequencing, and I am interested in how far the language of knowledge-rich planning translates into practical decisions about what goes in which term.

The most useful practical experience has been a small collaboration. A second-year teacher in my department and I were asked to put together a short transition unit for incoming Year 7 pupils, built around a single novel. We had six weeks of lessons to plan and very little time, so we divided the work: she drafted the reading sequence and assessment, I built the vocabulary and comprehension tasks and gathered the background material on the author. What I learned was mostly about constraints. Our first draft assumed pupils had met certain terms at primary school; when we checked with two feeder schools, that assumption did not hold for one of them, so we rewrote the opening fortnight. The unit ran last September and the department kept it with revisions. I would not claim it transformed anything, but it was taught by people other than its authors and made sense to them, which felt like the real test.

Outside school I help coordinate volunteers at a community library, which mainly involves rotas and stock, and I sing with a local choir. Both are reminders that organising other people's time is a skill in itself.

What I want from a master's is the theoretical and methodological grounding I currently lack. I can describe curriculum problems; I am less confident analysing them with the tools of curriculum studies, or designing a piece of research that would stand up to scrutiny. I am particularly keen to work on curriculum evaluation and on the policy context that shapes what schools are able to offer. In the longer term I intend to qualify as a teacher and move towards subject leadership, where these decisions are made, and I would rather approach that work having thought carefully about it first.