Enrichment relates to breadth of study and experience. It involves offering learners a wide variety of opportunities, both within and outside the curriculum, and exposing them to experiences not usually encountered as part of the standard curriculum.

Extension (also referred to as enrichment through depth), involves children and young people following the standard curriculum but developing a deeper understanding through encountering more complex resources and materials, tackling more challenging questions and tasks, demonstrating higher levels of thinking, and presenting increasingly sophisticated responses.

Extension is not more of the same; nor is it accelerating through content. Instead it relies on teachers having:

• a sound understanding of what constitutes high-level responses in a subject, so that they can make accurate differentiation in terms of expectation and performance;
• the confidence to ask questions and probe learners' thinking without necessarily knowing the answer themselves and/or without expecting there to be a right answer.

The development of children and young people's (and teachers') thinking skills plays an important part in this, and exploring ideas is a key element.

All learners benefit from access to enrichment and extension, and schools and clusters need to assess the range of opportunities they offer.

For example, two secondary schools and the British Museum are planning a collaboration in which students will spend a day at the museum learning how to use objects and documents to reconstruct a dead civilisation. They will then return to school and groups will work separately to create an imaginary civilisation -- its history, technology, languages, communications, system of government, sport, art and architecture, religious beliefs etc. They will then make a series of artefacts to be found by future archaeologists as remnants of their civilisation. Finally, groups will visit each other's archaeological remains and try to reconstruct the civilisations.

If enrichment relies on too many unplanned or bolt-on extracurricular activities, without corresponding opportunities and/or follow-up in the taught curriculum, it can lead to eclectic provision. Enrichment through breadth needs to be closely linked to plans for extending through depth or to plans for acceleration or faster pace of study.

For examples of effective enrichment activities, see Case study 13: Offering extra GCSEs from year 9 and Case study 18: The Advanced Extension Award in English.

The most able students could take an Advanced Extension Award in one of 17 subjects available. These have been developed to provide a further opportunity for gifted students to demonstrate their depth of knowledge that goes beyond A level. Candidates are expected to show their critical and creative abilities in their responses to questions, as well as demonstrating their capability to draw together different elements of the subject.

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