🧠 Rethinking Scaffolds in the Primary Classroom

Not just support for struggle, tools for organising knowledge and extending thinking

Oct 27, 2025

💡 The Big Idea

Carl Hendrick

recently highlighted how scaffolds are often poorly understood and have been based on very little research. Reduced to a clumsy formula: give support when pupils struggle, remove it when they succeed, scaffolds have potentially been widely misused.

I’ve never really seen scaffolds as something just for struggling learners. As I argued in A Learning Model Within the Environment, scaffolds are tools for organising knowledge and ways of offloading thinking into the space around us. Whether it’s a model text, a worked example, or a multiplication square, a scaffold can guide thinking, spark recall, or shape the performance of a particular process.

Scaffolds aren’t just stabilisers for novices. They’re part of an expert’s toolkit, too.

👀 A Closer Look

In his recent Substack article,

Carl Hendrick

questions the common way scaffolding is described in teacher guides and CPD: a kind of support you add when students struggle, and remove when they succeed. He describes ‘the rule itself is too mechanical for something as complex and dynamic as human learning.’ It’s a familiar narrative, though and one that’s been shared so widely it’s often embedded into teaching and learning policy.

There is some merit to the idea. Scaffolds can absolutely help students who are struggling, and they should be supported when the time is right. It also clashes with the principle of desirable difficulty — if we immediately rush in with support the moment a child struggles, we risk removing the very kind of productive challenge that strengthens memory and long-term learning. As Robert Bjork put it,

“Conditions that make performance improve rapidly often fail to support long-term retention and transfer, whereas conditions that create challenges and slow the rate of apparent learning often optimise long-term retention.”

Scaffolds for struggling students is also a fairly two-dimensional view. Scaffolds aren’t just rescue tools. They’re part of how we all think and perform.

As I explored in A Learning Model Within the Environment, we don’t just think in our heads, we think through the environment around us. Cognitive scientists like Merlin Donald call this the External Memory Field - the diagrams, lists, timelines, models, manipulatives, and notes we use to offload thinking and make abstract ideas concrete. Children, like adults, benefit from these supports not because they’re weak, but because they’re learning.

Scaffolds are cognitive tools. They allow us to manage working memory, hold more in mind, and structure our thinking. In this way, they’re metacognitive too. We want children to think: What tools will help me complete this task? What support do I need to move my thinking forward?

But somewhere along the way, scaffolding got caught up in the world of differentiation. It became common to hand more support to “low ability” pupils and strip it away from the more confident. But I’d argue the opposite might be true: higher attaining pupils might benefit just as much, sometimes more, from well-designed scaffolds that deepen, extend, or refine their thinking.

So rather than viewing scaffolds as temporary support wheels, maybe we should start seeing them as thinking structures. Tools for learning. Tools that help all children to take what’s in their head, and organise it more clearly. Or to prop up some thinking so that students can think more deeply about other aspects of their learning.

So What Are Scaffolds For?

Let’s take a moment to unpack what scaffolds actually do for learners:

🧠 To Support Thinking

Scaffolds can reduce the mental load by offering partial knowledge, allowing pupils to focus on retrieving, generating, or manipulating ideas instead of holding everything in working memory.

Example: A partially completed table in science helps pupils focus on applying vocabulary, not formatting the structure.

📦 To Organise Knowledge

They act as containers for information. Think Venn diagrams, grids, sentence frames, graphic organisers, so pupils can sort, label, and chunk ideas in ways that support retrieval and long-term memory.

Example: A character map in English or a place-value chart in maths.

🔁 To Sequence Processes

Some scaffolds show steps in a process or help learners arrange those steps into a sequence they can follow or reproduce.

Example: A writing flow chart, or visual checklist for a science investigation.

🎯 To Model Expert Performance

Scaffolds can include worked examples, annotated model answers, or sentence starters that highlight the features of high-quality thinking and performance.

Example: A model paragraph with key techniques labelled, or a colour-coded maths solution.

🛠️ To Prompt Strategy Use

Scaffolds can nudge pupils towards using the right strategy at the right time, like a “strategy strip” on a desk or a visible thinking routine embedded in a wall display.

Example: Reminder cards on a working wall that list: “Writing figurative techniques such as similes, metaphors, personification, or alliteration.

🎯 The Bits That Stick

✅ Scaffolds aren’t just for struggling learners; they’re tools for all learners to organise, connect, and apply knowledge.
✅ They act as external memory aids, helping offload cognitive load so pupils can focus on the right things at the right time.
✅ We should model how to use scaffolds and when to let them go, because that’s what experts do too.
✅ Reframing scaffolds as part of metacognitive practice helps shift them from “support” to “strategy.”

In a bit,
Coops 😎

📚 References

Hendrick, C. (2024). The problem with scaffolding. Substack
Donald, M. (1991). Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition. Harvard University Press.