July 14, 2025, by Rupert Knight

The importance of stakeholders within subject leadership

As Primary teachers, we are tasked with leading a subject within our schools. In this post, Emma Twomey from James Peacock Infant School in Nottinghamshire uses the example of Science leadership to reflect on the value of engaging with stakeholders.

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I have had the fortunate task of leading Science at several different schools within Nottinghamshire for some 12 years. Each school has brought new challenges and adventures to the role.

According to the PSQM (Primary Science Quality Mark), the key to the role of subject leader can be neatly categorised into 3 aspects. It is:

• enacted through a mentoring and evaluation cycle which informs development

• created through working strategically with leadership and other school stakeholders

• enacted through engagement with CPD and wider expertise related to development principles

Although these aspects of leadership are written with Science development in mind, there is no doubt they can be applied to any subject leadership role.

I want to dive a little deeper into this second aspect: the role of subject leader working with ‘stakeholders’. In practice, I think many subject leads within Primary schools feel that their role works in isolation; they are holding the flag for their subject, working tirelessly to promote their curricular area in a battle ground of subjects, all fighting for prime position on the weekly timetable of events.

So, who are these mystery stakeholders? How do we engage with them? What might this engagement look like?

Who are the Stakeholders?

Stakeholders can be pupils, teachers, senior leaders, governors, parents, SENCO, subject leaders (both within your school and outside of your school), secondary schools, university leads, teaching assistants and school business managers etc, and this is not an exhaustive list. These people all have a role to play within your subject area, a role to support, challenge, enhance and engage with both yourself and your subject. A strong subject leader will realise that, without the support of these stakeholders, their subject has the potential of being sidelined, new initiatives and development of the subject will be harder to maintain without the full support of the team.

Engage the team and suddenly they are all travelling with you and not against you.

How do we engage with stakeholders?

To understand how we might engage most effectively with stakeholders, we must first think more carefully about our role as subject leader. Broadly speaking, when we are developing a curriculum development plan, jobs sit in two camps, there are things which are operational and things which are strategic.

• Operational jobs are the day to day, present jobs which need doing e.g. lesson support, resource managements, timetabling, communications – or making sure the day-to-day curriculum area is running smoothly. The operational responsibilities involve the day-to-day management and implementation of teaching and learning, focusing on practical aspects of, in this case, science education, ensuring it is delivered effectively and smoothly.

• Strategic areas are those things which you are planning for the future, ensuring sustainability and moving towards further goals e.g. resource planning, monitoring and evaluating, networking, curriculum design etc. or the longer-term goals of the subject area. Strategic responsibilities involve long-term planning, vision setting and ensuring, in this case, the science education aligns with the school’s overarching goals and priorities. They are about focusing on the bigger picture and developing initiatives that drive sustained improvement in science teaching and learning and curriculum design.

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) stresses that leaders require strategic insights to drive decision-making, while operational responsibilities are more relevant to implementation initiatives.

Once we have a developed plan of action, incorporating both areas of implementation, we must now get stakeholders on board. So how do we communicate effectively with these stakeholders?

Effective communication, in particular with governors and senior leaders ensures that they understand the value of your subject within the curriculum. The Wellcome Trust (2020) states that any communication that is provided about the impact of science teaching on pupil outcomes can enhance support from leadership. Therefore, impact is key, any communication that is provided by leaders should ultimately identify intended or actual impact on pupil outcomes, driven by data –  both qualitative and quantitative.

What might this process look like?

For the rest of the article I want to talk about my experience and how I have used the PSQM framework to support the way I have engaged with stakeholders and developed Science at my school.

All subject leaders know that to develop a subject we must first understand the point to which we are starting from. The PSQM framework represents a cyclical approach, using the stages of audit, implementation and review to assess, develop and evaluate both the teaching and learning of a subject, as well as its curriculum design.

So let’s begin with the audit:

We start with what we know about our school – the context, location, the many voices that make up your school. Who are the stakeholders? The pupils, teachers, parents, SENCO, office manager etc, anyone who has any sort of vested interest in your school, its curriculum and its pupils’ outcomes.  Think critically about what is going well and what areas you wish to develop. When I took over as Science lead at my school there was an off-the-shelf curriculum, a lot of textbook-led lessons, little to no additional stakeholder engagement other than the teachers. Science was a subject taught each week, but it stood alone, boxed in a prescribed weekly hour. Teacher, pupil and parent voice spoke of Science but parents knew little of what was being taught or the engagement of their child wanting to be a scientist, or what, indeed, a scientist actually was. It was fabulous that curriculum areas were being covered, with clear progression from Foundation to KS2, but what impact was there on pupil outcomes?

The voice of stakeholders was suddenly informing my audit and from this, an action plan could be made. Drawing on the input from the different stakeholder sources, I drafted a plan with clear strategic aims, which centralised everyone’s focus on the subject and highlighted the impact to be measured. The plan was refined with the aims agreed with staff and senior leaders. Everyone had a stake in it moving forward, they felt heard and had vested interests in its success. For example, teachers felt they were going to be supported through mentoring and modelling of a new curriculum. Pupils felt engaged with the movement towards more practical and physically engaging lessons. English and Maths leaders supported areas for more cross-curricular learning, whilst parents and governors supported the move to welcome experts into the classroom to build our science capital as a school.

The next phase was then implementation. Through careful liaising with all stakeholders, I had the support of a team and was working towards a shared goal for science. This wasn’t my personal project, but a whole school approach. Implementation can only be success if everyone is on board. The EEF produced a review of effective implementation, its guidance focusing on three key elements:

1. The behaviours that drive effective implementation

In other words, we first must engage those people we want to bring along with us (i.e. the stakeholders), invest time in talking to them, making sure they are shaping the overall direction your curriculum takes and how it will be implemented. Staff at my school wanted mentoring and support with practical ideas to engage children, so we worked together to make this happen. It’s also important not to  be afraid to adapt and improve as you go. Some things didn’t work – we wanted to increase links with the local country park, but unfortunately this could only happen at certain times of the year, so we had to be flexible with planning.

2. Contextual factors that facilitate implementation

When implementing any ideas you must put the context of the school at the centre. We are an infant school and, while we initially used evidence from books, as a team we quickly realised that books did not showcase our pupils’ learning. Instead we adapted and turned to floor books and floor displays, where every child, teacher, etc. could quickly see from one classroom to the next the impact of the new curriculum and way of teaching. This also empowered teachers to teach more practical lessons as they could spend more time doing, rather than writing in books.

3. A structured, but flexible process to enact implementation.

Our school is by no means a finished product. We are constantly in this cycle of audit, implantation, review. However, as we have built up a strong link between our stakeholders throughout and across school, we work as a team, thus adapting and reviewing and then implementing again as a whole school approach, where everyone works towards and for the best outcomes of all pupils.

Finally then we reach the review stage:

This is where we as a team look at the impact, evaluating the strengths as well as the areas for further development moving forward. This can be:

• impact on pupils (e.g. engagement, enjoyment, knowledge, skills, outcomes)

• impact on staff (e.g. subject knowledge, confidence, collaboration and consistency, reduced workload)

• whole school impact (e.g. cross curricular links, cultural capital, quality of opportunities)

All these areas of impact can be reviewed and evaluated to set new goals and actions for the next development cycle. As previously mentioned, regardless of which subject area one leads, it is important to keep going round in that cycle of audit -> implementation -> review. We still have areas we wish to work on but we stop, we reflect and we set new goals based on a whole school approach.

Next steps:

After several years of this development cycle, Science at our school is running smoothly, pupil attainment is good and teachers feel positive in their teaching. However, we know as subject leaders we are constantly looking for ways to find lasting impact and development in our curricular area.

The Ofsted Research Review of Science from 2021 highlights the importance of integrating science into the wider curriculum and ensuring it contributes to cross-curricular goals such as Literacy and Numeracy development.

Lots of schools will have Mathematics or Literacy on their school development plans; last year our school had ‘improving the reading outcomes across school’ and ’embedding learning opportunities outside of the classroom.’ Science wasn’t mentioned on the action plan. However by thinking strategically, Science was seamlessly incorporated. I asked for Science books to be provided at the reading fair, daily ‘BookFlix’ books to contain a range of fiction and non-fiction texts and classroom texts and book cases to incorporate a range of Science along with non-Science books, age-appropriate to the reader/ class. Time was given during lessons to research and read Science texts or articles and vocabulary lessons within English lessons could link to Science topics being covered that half term. Science week itself was linked to the story Too Much Stuff by Emily Gravatt, and was used across school for the week to link Science, English, Maths, Geography, Art/DT and even Music.

Outside  the classroom, friends of our school developed a garden area, where children have begun a gardening club. They have also designed and created all weather areas, thinking carefully about which materials were suitable for the area. The introduction of OPAL play and a sand pit, mud kitchen and water play has enabled opportunities for scientific language to be used at playtime. In doing away with exercise books, pupils have spent more time investigating and experimenting in their environment, taking material and plant hunts outside, creating bug houses and bird boxes and learning about the changing seasons first hand.

A final thought

My one piece of advice for any subject leader, is to talk.

Speak with those many stakeholders who make up your school community. You will find they are incredibly supportive when they feel like they too have ownership and thereby lasting impact on the development of pupil progress within your subject area.

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