When we decided to rewrite our entire curriculum, I knew the biggest challenge wouldn’t be the content. It would be the coordination. Packwood Haugh has been educating children since 1892. We’re set across 66 acres of Shropshire countryside, part of the Shrewsbury Family of Schools, with 216 pupils aged four to thirteen.
We have subject specialist teachers from year three, sixty full boarders, and children heading to some of the most competitive senior schools in the country – over half to Shrewsbury itself. With approximately 20% of our pupils on the SEN register, any system we use has to work for a genuine range of ability and need.
Before Toddle, every teacher had their own system for planning. Staff and departments existed in silos; collaboration meant SharePoint folders and good intentions. Reports lived in our management information system, which was functional but inflexible – any customisation request took about three months to action. And it was really difficult for anyone to have the big picture: were our pupils being taught things in a logical order? Were there links in their learning that were being missed?
We needed one place that would let us rewrite the curriculum together, not in isolation.
Building the curriculum we actually want
This year is our final year doing the full suite of ISEB Common Entrance exams. Like many prep schools, we’re moving away from Common Entrance and building our own assessment framework as part of the Shrewsbury Family of Schools. It’s the conversation happening across the sector right now: if you’re removing a rigorous, externally accredited examination, what replaces it?
For us, the answer starts with visibility. Toddle gave us something we’d never had before: as leaders, we can actually see what every teacher is doing, in one place. That’s invaluable when you’re trying to design a coherent assessment framework across an entire school.
The AI planning tools helped us move to our own curriculum vision in ways I didn’t expect. Many of our staff had never used AI at all, but because it’s integrated directly into the planning function, the barrier was low. Staff have been able to create an entire term’s unit of work in minutes, something that usually would have taken days, if not weeks.
Teachers also used the AI assistant to generate cross-curricular links directly within a unit plan. So an English unit on Twisted Fairytales could surface connections to History, Art and Design, and Drama that teachers wouldn’t have spotted on their own.
We rolled out Toddle carefully – in small groups of staff, each with someone confident about the platform who then became natural advocates. Surprisingly, some of the most vocal support came from our more established colleagues who aren’t necessarily confident with tech, but who were now able to see really new and engaging ideas coming through their planning. The partnership with our school’s Toddle buddy, Charmi, was a key part of this, both in being able to confidently train our staff and to ensure the platform worked the way we needed it to.
Reports that truly reflect the whole child
Prep school reports are not simple. Each one involves every subject teacher, form teachers, the boarding house, and our learning support department. On Toddle, we’ve structured these exactly how we want them – our branding, our layout, our colours. The learning support department can see what every other teacher has written. When the report is done, we click a button and it’s sent. The administration that used to eat into weeks is simply gone.
For our sixty boarders’ parents, families in China, Japan, America, this transparency matters enormously. They can’t pop into school on a Thursday afternoon. Now on the first day of each term, we can easily share curriculum unit plans with all parents, so they have visibility around what their child will be learning. This has proved really helpful in supporting our SEN pupils, who benefit from pre-learning.
One small change captures the difference well. Our highest academic achievement award, a gold award, used to rely on the child remembering they’d received one and showing it to their form teacher.
Now, the member of staff who awards it takes a photo, shares it on Toddle, and parents see it instantly. It’s consistent, it’s immediate, and children are proud. They deserve to have that moment shared properly.
What I’d say to another prep school
We had our ISI inspection recently. Our previous inspection in 2023 rated us ‘excellent’ in all areas, and this time we were equally prepared but got there a lot faster. With Toddle, we pulled up plans, printed evidence, and showed examples of student work, all from one place. No one spent days trying to find things.
But the message isn’t about inspections. Toddle has been a totally integral part of our curriculum development programme. I don’t think our curriculum rewrite would have happened at the pace it did, or been as successful, without it.
The most significant impact has been the time saved for teachers and the new opportunities for staff collaboration, which simply weren’t possible in the same way before. From a leadership perspective, we can now see planning provision broken down by subject, year group, course, class, or individual pupil, which helps inform our quality assurance when we do learning walks and book looks.
If your prep school is asking the same questions we were – how to move beyond Common Entrance, how to bring scattered planning into one place, how to give parents actual visibility of their child’s learning, then Toddle is worth serious consideration. And when you get started, ask about the Toddle Buddies. Ours was Charmi, and I’m fairly certain she dreaded seeing our emails in the morning. But she could not have done more.
You’re probably already having the curriculum conversation. The question is: do you have a partner who can help you move at the pace the conversation demands?
