Tackling the Exclusion Problem

September 2019: Student X arrives at secondary school. They are lively and full of energy, but can also be challenging and they sometimes struggle communicating respectfully with adults. September 2020: Student X is now in Y8. Y7 was difficult. There were lots of detentions for behavioural reasons. Student X received support from school pastoral networks,

Curriculum as the progression model: what are we really talking about?

This is the final post in a curriculum series I am writing for those who are relatively new to curriculum design, theory, and leadership. It would make most sense to read this final post having first read all previous posts. You can find them here. Curriculum: what are we really talking about? Knowledge-rich: what are

Core and hinterland: what are we really talking about?

This is the fifth in a curriculum series I am writing for those who are relatively new to curriculum design, theory and leadership. It would make most sense to read this fifth post having first read all previous posts. You can find them here. Curriculum: what are we really talking about? Knowledge-rich: what are we

Sequencing and coherence: what are we really talking about?

This is the fourth in a curriculum series I am writing for those who are relatively new to curriculum design, theory and leadership. It would make most sense to read this fourth post having first read all previous posts. You can find them here. Curriculum: what are we really talking about? Knowledge-rich: what are we

Disciplinary (and substantive) knowledge: what are we really talking about?

This is the third in a curriculum series I am writing for those who are relatively new to curriculum design, theory and leadership. It would make most sense to read this third post having first read both previous posts. You can find them here. Curriculum: what are we really talking about? Knowledge-rich: what are we

Knowledge-rich: what are we really talking about?

Last week we thought about the curriculum as a narrative. A novel with an interrelated web of themes, plots and places. The analogy helps because it allows us to see the role that every piece of knowledge must play within the curriculum at large. What it doesn’t do is illustrate the central role that knowledge

Curriculum: what are we really talking about?

About a year ago my interest in curriculum was piqued when a colleague recommended I read Michael Young’s Knowledge and the Future School. On the matter of curriculum, I was swiftly obsessional. I was – and still am – convinced that curriculum is the single biggest lever to addressing educational inequality. And I remain adamant

An Integrated Approach to Teacher Development

For as long as I can remember, the efforts of our school CPD have been focussed on trainee and NQT teachers. This was not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, given that so many of our teachers were new to the profession this made total sense. The problem was that, by the time that a

Planning for Residual Knowledge

Last week my colleague Rob sent over an interesting document that got us both thinking. It was a plan of possible ‘takeaway’ knowledge about Medieval England that Ian Dawson had put together in Exploring and Teaching Medieval History. I put the document out on twitter and asked if similar things had been created for other

Alignment across History and English: surely a good thing?

A few years ago my colleague in English Richard Gleig mentioned the benefits of cross-curricular alignment. We spoke about it then, but did very little to see any kind of plan come to fruition. In actuality, his curriculum was in a far stronger state than my own, and the idea of alignment felt like a