Calling all school Subject Leaders! Whether you work in a primary school or secondary school, if you’ve taken on a subject lead role for your school then this is the journal for you. Leading a subject can be a lot of fun, especially if you have a personal passion for your subject. You’ll get to deep dive into how to best the deliver the subject and inspire other teachers. However, it can also be a lot of work. Teachers always have a lot on their plate and being a subject lead is just one of many things you’ll need to balance. So we created the Subject Leader Journal to help stay on top of this responsibility and streamline your workload. Let’s talk about what you actually get inside your journal and how you can use it! If you’d like to see a video walkthrough, head to the end of this post to find it.
Find the Subject Leader Journals here
Getting Started
The Subject Leader Journal has a few parts – at the beginning, you’ll find pages to help with your overall long-term planning, then we break it down with 6 termly planning sections, and then there’s an organisation section with lots of tools to help you keep organised. There’s a lot packed in to each of these sections, so there’s a contents page at the beginning so you can always easily find the page you’ll need.
The journal has an undated calendar, so you can start whenever you need to. This is great for putting in important dates for things like CPD training or meetings, but also for planning out when you’re going to do certain projects for your subject. Then there’s a long term action plan, so you can think about any big projects or actions you want to carry out for your subject over the year. This page gives you space to think about each objective and how you’ll achieve it in terms of budget, staffing, and resources, as well as what the impact will be. There’s also a subject showcase page, so you can show off the great work that’s being done in your subject, with work samples or photos.
A Section for Each Term
Then there are 6 sections, one for each term, and each has the same set of planning pages. There are dedicated pages for planning what you’ll do during your Subject Leader Time, so if you think of tasks you need to get done you can add it to this page, then you can check back on it when you get your planning time. We think it’s great to have a record for your To Do lists like this, rather than throwing them away, as then you can look back and see what you’ve done and what you’ve achieved! There’s also a short term action plan for each term, where you can take some of the bigger actions from your Long Term Action Plan page and break them down into smaller actions, so you can tackle it over a term. If one of your Long Term objectives is to provide teachers across the school with training, you can focus on this in one term by breaking it down into smaller tasks, like researching training, taking some training yourself, meeting with teachers to find out their needs and skills gaps, and planning how you’ll schedule and deliver the training.
There are also plenty of pages to help you to manage your subject and see how it’s being delivered in your school. There’s a Monitoring page, where you can keep notes from your book scrutinies and highlight areas you want to focus on. There’s a Learning Walk log, where you can note your observations, as well as what went well and what could be developed. We’ve also included a page for Pupil Voice sessions, so you can note down feedback and ideas from meeting with students about your subject.
There’s plenty of space for evaluation and reflection throughout the journal – this is a key part of teaching and being a subject leader, and we include spaces for reflection on most pages. We have a dedicated Evaluation and Forward Planning page in each term’s section, so you can bring it all together and think carefully about your subject. There’s also a mind map, so you can think about your ideas and what you want to do moving forward.
Staying Organised
Last but definitely not least is the Organisation section. It has a tab so you can easily flick to it, and of course the pages are listed in the Contents so you can find them easily. This is where you’ll keep all of the resources and information you’ll want to refer to throughout the year. There’s a page dedicated to working with cluster schools or other schools in your area, including one for moderation and looking at samples of work. There’s a timetable so you can keep track of when your timetable is being taught across the school, and a long term overview so you can keep track of what’s happening in your subject throughout the year – so if you’re history lead, you could note down which topic is being covered by each year group in each term.
Then there are a few pages to keep track of useful information, like your resources and helpful contacts. There are some CPD pages so you can keep a record of both the CPD you have undertaken yourself as well as any CPD training you’ve delivered. There are also some records pages and notes pages for any additional things you want to keep track of or note down.
We hope that by having one journal for all of your subject leader tasks, it helps to manage the workload and also helps you to stay organised by keeping it all in one place! Or course, the journals come in a range of beautiful covers so you can choose your favourite. For more of a look inside the subject leader journal, check out the video below!
