A term checklist for the Primary Science HOD

Leading a Primary Science department is mostly invisible work. When it goes well, teachers feel supported, assessments run smoothly, remediation lands where it is needed, and nobody notices the planning that made it happen. When it goes badly, it is usually because a small thing was missed at the wrong moment: a topic left off the assessment blueprint, a common misconception spotted too late to act on, a colleague quietly drowning in marking.

This is a checklist to catch those things before they become problems. It is organised by term phase, because timing is half the job. None of it is complicated. The value is in doing it deliberately rather than from memory, and in spacing it across the term so no single week carries everything.

If you want the wider picture of the role first, the Science HOD responsibilities guide covers the why. This page is the when.

Beginning of term

The start of term is about alignment: making sure everyone teaching the same level is working from the same plan.

• Confirm the scheme of work is shared and current, and that it matches the MOE Primary Science syllabus coverage for each level.
• Agree the assessment calendar early, so weighted assessments do not collide across subjects and teachers can plan marking load.
• Sketch the assessment blueprint for the first common assessment: which topics, which question types, and roughly how the marks are spread. Agreeing this now prevents an unbalanced paper later.
• Check that any teacher new to a level knows where the resources, past papers, and shared materials live.
• Note the misconceptions you already expect for the term's topics, so the team is watching for them from the first lesson rather than discovering them at marking. The misconceptions catalogue is a useful starting list.

Mid-term

Mid-term is about catching drift while there is still time to act.

• Check coverage against the plan. Is any class falling behind on a topic that the common assessment will test?
• Ask, informally, how marking load is sitting. A teacher three sets of scripts behind is a support issue, not a performance one.
• Look at any early assessment evidence for patterns that span classes. If the same misconception is showing up in more than one class, it is a department matter, not a single teacher's problem.
• Keep one eye on the quieter colleagues. The teacher who never raises a problem is not always the one without any.

Assessment and remediation

This is the phase where good department leadership shows up most clearly.

• Moderate before you finalise. A short shared read of scripts, on the marking scheme rather than on each other, keeps grading fair and surfaces disagreements about what a wrong answer means. Consistent judgement is the foundation of consistent support (Wiliam, 2011).
• Run item analysis on the common assessment, at least on the questions most pupils missed. The point is to read which wrong answers were chosen, not only the scores. The method is in item analysis for Science teachers.
• Plan remediation once, at department level, for the misconceptions that span classes, rather than letting each teacher rebuild the same reteach alone. The department-scale approach is in remedial programme planning.
• Make sure remediation is proportionate. Match the size of the response to the size and spread of the gap. Feedback and reteaching only help when they change what happens next (EEF, 2021).

Teacher workload and department visibility

• Protect marking time where you can. The expensive part of remediation is usually the working-out and the materials, not the teaching, so sharing one good plan across a level saves real hours.
• Prefer evidence that already exists to new paperwork. If you can get the picture you need from a shared look at marking, do not commission a report to produce it.
• Keep the number of parallel initiatives honest. A department can only absorb so much change in a term; protecting focus is part of protecting workload.

End of term

The end of term is for closing the loop and carrying the useful parts forward.

• Check that the remediation you planned actually happened, and whether the follow-up re-checks came back cleaner. A reteach that was never re-checked is unfinished.
• Capture the two or three things that surprised you this term: a topic that landed badly, a misconception that was heavier than expected, a resource that worked. That short note is worth more next year than a long report nobody reads.
• Prepare a plain, meeting-ready summary for your own reporting cycle, built from the evidence you already have rather than assembled from scratch.

Where MyScienceHOD fits

Most of this checklist is department craft that has nothing to do with any tool. Where MyScienceHOD helps is the visibility part: it turns the marking your teachers already approve into a department-level view of common misconceptions and support needs, which is what the HOD Control Tower is for. The signal is the pattern across classes, never a ranking of teachers, and nothing reaches that view until a teacher has approved their own marking. If that would save you assembling the picture by hand, the free Beta is open to Singapore Science departments.