Be very clear in your own mind the reasons you’re moving to a new board, what advantages you see for your students and your teachers. Not only will this give you the necessary motivation, it will give you a compelling set of arguments when convincing colleagues, students, and parents.

When making any kind of change, there are certain people you need on board: other teachers in your team, school leadership, students and parents. Do everything you can to lay out the advantages to these stakeholders as early as possible and engage their commitment. Information evenings, clear communications, and being available to answer questions will all help people understand why you have switched and the benefits of doing so.

Where you do need to create new content, you may find your new exam board provides a lot of this for you. If you’re moving to OxfordAQA, you’ll find switching guides, schemes of work, teaching resources, past papers, and marked exemplars in the Resources section of our website. Textbooks can also be incredibly useful, providing a potential teaching structure and sample assessments.

As you start rolling out the new course, build in ways of monitoring its progress. This can include data from student assessments and surveys of key stakeholders, but can also be as simple as a quick chat with colleagues and students to find out how it’s going.

The ultimate acid test of a new curriculum is how the exams go for your students. With this in mind, you should start preparing students for the new assessment structure as early as you can. Use past paper questions for key assessments (e.g. mock exams) and mark student work with the exam board mark scheme wherever possible. This way, everyone gets used to thinking about the skills students need to demonstrate to be successful in the real exams.

Teaching is a career when you are continually looking to tweak and improve. Once your first cohort has sat their exams, really interrogate their data to see what has gone well and where improvements could be made. OxfordAQA’s Data Insights provides more detailed and customised analysis than other results analysis tool on the market. Featuring updated graphs and visualisations for quicker and easier trend analysis, Data Insights enables you to dig deeper into your learners’ results. Allowing you to compare student performance at both a high level and in granular detail, identify patterns, strengths and weaknesses and improve the performance of your next cohorts.