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Teaching and Learning at Lakelands
At Lakelands Primary School, we believe that every child deserves excellent teaching, every day.
Our approach to teaching and learning is built around our Expert Teaching Framework, a shared, evidence-informed model which supports consistently high-quality teaching across our school. It brings together educational research, professional expertise and, importantly, our knowledge of the children we teach.
At its heart is a simple principle: expert teaching does not happen by chance. It is carefully designed, refined through practice and continually adapted in response to what pupils know, understand and need next.
Teaching that helps learning last
We understand learning as a change in long-term memory. This means our teaching is designed not simply to help children complete a task successfully today but to help them understand, remember and confidently use their learning in the future.
Everything begins with clarity about what we want children to learn. Teaching, questioning, practice and assessment are then deliberately focused on helping pupils secure that learning.
Our five elements of expert teaching
Our approach brings together five connected elements:
Conditions for Learning
Children learn best when they feel safe, included and ready to learn. We establish predictable routines and high expectations, create positive and fair classroom environments and ensure pupils' voices are heard and valued. Structured opportunities for talk and oracy help children explain ideas, listen to others and develop their thinking.
Instruction
Our teachers make new learning clear and manageable. They activate prior knowledge, explicitly teach important vocabulary, break complex ideas into carefully sequenced steps, model processes and thinking and regularly check that pupils understand before moving learning forward.
Practice
Children need meaningful opportunities to revisit and apply what they have learned. Retrieval, spaced practice and carefully sequenced opportunities to move from guided to independent work help pupils develop fluency, confidence and secure long-term knowledge.
Assessment
Assessment is part of everyday teaching. Teachers use questioning, discussion, mini-whiteboards, observation, low-stakes checks and other purposeful approaches to understand what pupils know and where misconceptions or gaps remain. This information helps teachers decide what to do next.
Adaptation
We maintain ambitious expectations for every pupil while recognising that children may need different support to achieve them. Teachers adapt explanations, questioning, representations, scaffolds, grouping and feedback in response to pupils' learning. Support is carefully adjusted and gradually removed as pupils become increasingly confident and independent.
Ambition for every child
A central principle of our approach is that we adapt the support, not the ambition.
Children are not limited by fixed labels or expectations. Instead, teachers respond to what pupils know and understand at that point in their learning, providing additional modelling, examples, vocabulary, questioning, practice or scaffolding where needed.
As understanding grows, this support is gradually reduced, enabling children to become increasingly confident and independent learners.
This allows us to combine high expectations with an inclusive approach, ensuring that every pupil is supported to access ambitious learning and achieve their potential.
Developing confident, independent learners
We want children to understand not only what they are learning, but increasingly how they learn successfully.
Teachers model their thinking and teach children how to plan, monitor and evaluate their work. Children are encouraged to explain their reasoning, reflect on their approaches and respond purposefully to feedback.
Talk is an important part of this. Through structured oracy, pupils learn to explore ideas together, justify their thinking, listen and respond to others, and communicate confidently using increasingly precise vocabulary.
Teaching in the Early Years
Our youngest children experience the same principles in ways that are appropriate for the Early Years.
In EYFS, expert teaching is realised through purposeful instruction, play, routines and relationships. Warm relationships and predictable environments help children feel secure; adults model language and thinking; learning is revisited through songs, stories, play and shared experiences; and practitioners continuously observe and respond to children's understanding.
Support remains ambitious but flexible, with adults adapting language, questions, modelling and scaffolds before gradually stepping back as children's confidence and independence develop.
An evidence-informed approach
Our Expert Teaching Framework is informed by established educational research and evidence around explicit instruction, cognitive load, memory, retrieval practice, formative assessment, feedback, metacognition, adaptive teaching and oracy.
Importantly, our framework does not prescribe one way of teaching. Different subjects and different learning require different approaches. Instead, it provides shared principles which teachers combine with their subject expertise and professional judgement to make the best decisions for the pupils in front of them.
A shared commitment to excellent teaching
Our Expert Teaching Framework gives everyone at Lakelands a shared language and a clear understanding of what excellent teaching looks like. It supports professional development, reflection and continuous improvement while keeping our most important priority at the centre:
Ensuring that every child experiences ambitious, inclusive and effective teaching that enables them to learn, remember and achieve.
Find out more
Our full Expert Teaching Framework explains our approach in greater detail, sets out the research and evidence underpinning it, and shows how the framework is applied across the school, including within the Early Years.