Podcast is AI generated, and will make mistakes. Interactive transcript available in the podcast post.

Welcome to our new section, Unstoppable Resources!

Kris will continue his deep dive into Atomisation, which underpins much of the analytical work we do. It’s intended for high-performing school and subject leaders.

But what about the operational?

Let’s face it, when you’re a busy teacher and you have five lessons to teach today, analysis only gets you so far. That’s before we discuss the rest of your team. Ultimately, you need resources, lots of resources. You need to know what to present, what examples to use, and you need plenty of exercises for your students to work through. Concrete examples go a long way here.

With our Unstoppable Schools this is an integral part of what we provide. Here, we’re going to offer some insight into how it all works. How can you produce what you need at scale? What format should it take? What’s out there already? How do you determine high-quality instructional materials from profitable pulp? If you centralise or purchase resources for your department, does that deskill teachers?

The good news is if you’re subscribed to Unstoppable Learning, then you’re already subscribed to these posts, but if you’re only here for the pure analysis, you can edit the sections you’re subscribed to in your profile.

To kick off, a quick introduction to Naveen, for anyone who hasn’t been following her work this last decade: as part of the foundational team at Michaela Community School, Naveen taught a programme called Connecting Math Concepts (CMC). She used it to teach the very weakest children in Year 7. Naveen has described this experience - simply using the programme to teach - as the best training and professional development of her career.

It revolutionised her practice.

It informs much of her resource design to date.

And Naveen has created a lot of resources. Entire curricula, including supporting lessons and materials. Start to finish. Year 7-11 for more than one multi-academy trust; this includes the nation’s largest, United Learning, for its 55 secondary schools.

It has even informed her work in high-level curriculum design for many other MATs and governments around the world.

Why has Naveen taken so much from it?

Because of the impact she witnessed.

In one class were eleven-year-old children who couldn’t count. Oh, they could say ‘One, two, three…’ and so forth, up to ‘twenty,’ but they couldn’t count. They didn’t know what they were saying. Put seven objects in front of them and they couldn’t identify that as ‘seven.’ They had learnt to ‘say the words’ up to twenty the way you might memorise the lyrics of a song in foreign language: the sounds and music have stuck, but you have no idea what you’re saying.

By Year 9, this cohort of children were back in mainstream lessons, part of a cohort of children where 99.1% achieved at least Grade 4 in their GCSE exam, and 98.3% achieved a Grade 5.

Since then, Naveen has carried out trust-wide implementation of the CMC programme in the primary and secondary schools of three English academy trusts, Astrea, Athena, and City of London, and supported the implementation in one Australian chain of schools, Mastery Schools Australia (MSA).

At Astrea Academy Trust the weakest pupils, on average, gained 1.7 years on their numeracy age in twelve weeks, and were on track to gain at least 5.1 years in one academic year.

To understand the impact at Athena, you need to understand a little about English SATs: children in English primary schools all sit national exams in maths, reading and writing in Year 6 (fifth grade). Performance on these exams is reported as a scaled score out of 120, with 100 being needed to meet the expected standard (the only grades are ‘met expected standard’ and ‘not met….’)

The national average for meeting expected standard at the time was 73%.

At Athena Learning Trust, Naveen implemented the CMC programme in two primary schools. In 2024, before CMC, their performance on these exams was 54% and 45% meeting the expected standard.

In 2025, following CMC implementation, their results were 74% and 91% respectively, a 20 percentage point and 46 percentage point increase in just one year.

It’s results like this that led to the Athena Trust and Coolangatta (MSA) earning the Becker Excellent School Award, and extraordinary teachers like Bryce, Brooke and Jamie at Southport (MSA) earning the Engelmann Excellence in Education Awards.

So, why not get CMC in your school or trust right this minute?

Naveen might have instigated and led these initiatives, but she certainly didn’t achieve those results on her own. Network leaders, school leaders, middle leaders, individual teachers, instructional coaches, they were all responsible and deserve the credit for these outstanding outcomes. People like Jon Owen, Emma Kerr, Kim Flynn, Tamara Bressi, Rebecca Sanders, Kevin Surrey, Suzy Wybrow, Avin Bissoo, Claire Ankers, Sarah Green, Toni Hatten-Roberts, Michael Roberts, Joe Kirby, Tehrim Valibhai, Mouhssin Ismail, Hywel Jones, Bryce Phillips, Brooke Schembri, Jamie Phillips… this long list isn’t even comprehensive. In short, unless you have a real team of exceptional individuals, people prepared to put ego to one side and learn from these extraordinary programmes and their wrap around support, it cannot work. You might have heard that these programmes include scripts for teachers. It’s true. Sounds simple. Read the script. You would be astounded by how much there is to learn to deliver scripted lessons effectively.

Maybe you’re ready for this; perhaps you have the team. If so, reach out. We have nothing to offer here, but we can put you in touch with the right people.

Or maybe this isn’t what you’re looking for; perhaps you’re working in the secondary setting, where CMC doesn’t apply.

CMC doesn’t apply, but its theoretical underpinnings do. The work that Engelmann and Carnine outlined in their Theory of Instruction underlies so much of what we do more broadly at Unstoppable Learning, and Kris’ writing in particular.

But Theory is very analytical. CMC is operational. It takes the analysis and shows you one way it can be concretely applied.

So, Naveen will kick off this section with a series exclusively on CMC, and my, is there a lot to discuss. It’s a programme so rigorous, so detailed, and so unusual in its design - it would have to be, to get these kinds of outcomes - that it will surprise and inspire

Stay tuned as we explore this magnum opus in the coming weeks; learn how it applies the principles in Theory, and how you can lift and apply those same principles in your own schools.

Share